So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.