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The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

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Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitter...more

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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

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If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstr...more

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Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relat...more

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Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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You don’t make art out of good intentions.

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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

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I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction dra...more

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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will ther...more

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So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and c...more

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To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the gro...more

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Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of a...more

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...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.