One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

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.

In Guinea I could read [Franz] Kafka. I re-discover in him my own discomfort.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.