I considered calmly that I was born to write.

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.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.