I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity - and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.