Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

Man is condemned to be free

It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.

In love, one and one are one.

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

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.