Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying