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

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

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

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