I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

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

Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.

Man must be invented each day

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.