I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?