I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.