Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

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

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.