Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.

I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude."