I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

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.

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.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head