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

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.

We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.