It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

I am a man, Jupiter, and each man must invent his own path.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.

I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.