People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

I have always been an optimist, perhaps even too much.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

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.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident