I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.