The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world; you want to blow it up.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

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

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.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.