Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.

They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.

How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.

Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

That's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

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