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.

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.

The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

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.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.