When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

We are our choices.