This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.

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.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

I considered calmly that I was born to write.