A writer who writes, "I am alone" ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addre...ssing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them... and makes them proud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agree...d that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himse...lf, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he alive and real, and not dying and without truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking--and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a ...way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, becau...se he is separated from it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, i...s at the same time its ruling intellectual force. No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »