We are condemned to live together.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

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.

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.