I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

The questions I would have liked to ask people were: ‘Are you in love? What are you reading?

It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.