Introspection is always retrospection

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe.

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

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