My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

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?

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.