The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged.

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.

Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.

It is always more valuable to report the truth.