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

Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!

I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.

Hell is for other people.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

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.