Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.