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

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.