I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves.

But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.