Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness. Only sterility is truly distinguished—the man who effaces himself along with his secret, because he disdains to parade it: sentiments expressed are an agony for irony, a slap at humor…
To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
To publish one’s taints in order to amuse or exasperate! A barbarism with respect to our intimacy, a profanation, a defilement. And a temptation. I know what I am talking about, and I speak—advisedly. At least I have the excuse of hating my actions, of performing them without believing in them. You are more honest: you will write books and you will believe in them, you will believe in the reality of words, in those childish and indecent fictions…
[Y]ou have often reproached me for what you call my “appetite for destruction.” You should know that I destroy nothing: I record, I record the imminent, the thirst of a world which is canceling itself out and which, upon the wreck of its appearances, races toward the unknown and the incommensurable, toward a spasmodic style…
I am far from trying to pervert your hopes: life will take care of that.
