To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

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

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

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?

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.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.