I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

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.

It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.

I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.

What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?