The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.