A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that white spellbinding road headed straight for the unknown ... a nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

The savage hatred I feel for crowds is getting worse, natural enemies that they are of imagination and of thought.

I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.