“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.”

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates.

I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it.

I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.

But that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.

But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

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

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

I don’t like tokenism. I don’t like the idea that somebody should just appear at a press conference or in a media interview because they are a woman.