I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.

Introspection is always retrospection

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

You are -- your life, and nothing else.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.