Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

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.

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.