Hell is other people at breakfast.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me — and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.