I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?