Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

Happiness is generous. It does not subsist on destruction.

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.

There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.... War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. "Art and nothing but art", said Nietzsche, "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.