A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false. "Pessimism and Tyranny"