“Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.”

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.

I decided to be what crime made of me.

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.