Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Because we can imagine, we are free.

For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.