Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

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

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.