Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?