I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

I have always been happy. Even if I had been more honest with regard to myself at that moment I should still have written La Nausee.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.