“It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.”

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race.

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.

Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it’s own reward?

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.

Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.

I’m suspicious of any mode of transportation that requires a running start.

I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.

The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me – my mother’s side of the family have awful legs.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.