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

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.

Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.

A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?