I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.

Do you think I can read [Alain] Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He does not feel himself maimed.