... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose a future.

I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only than.

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

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.