"Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less."

"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book."

"Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

"Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present"

"By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time."

"Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him."

"At seventy-seven it is time to be earnest."

"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic"

"Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness."

"I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready."

"There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you."

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."

"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink."

"You have to die a few times before you can really live."

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."

"The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart)."

"And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year;"

"Genius is childhood recovered at will."

"In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!"

"How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering."

"In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times."

"So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk."

"Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom"

"Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time."