It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.