A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.