A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.