I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.