I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?

Murder is terribly exhausting.

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

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.