If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.

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.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

The past is the luxury of proprietors.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.