But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

We make our own hell out of the people around us.

Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.