One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.