What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.

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

I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.

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.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.