There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

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

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.