Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

emotion is first of all and in principle an accident

But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?