What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?

What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.