Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.

We make our own hell out of the people around us.

We are our choices.

Heroism is not to be won at the point of a pen.

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.

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.