The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.