I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people.

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.