I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.