Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.