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.

She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: "It shines like a little diamond", "What does?" "This moment. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; I am eternal.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

Words are loaded pistols.

I considered calmly that I was born to write.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.