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.

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.

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 am myself and I am here.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?