The public, too, has to make an effort in order to understand the writer who, though he renounce complacent obscurity, cannot always express his new-hidden thoughts lucidly and according to accepted models.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

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

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.