For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

This [service to oppressed] is the writer's task, and, if he fulfills it as he should, he acquires no merit from it.

This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Two people can form a community by excluding a third.

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

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.