Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.

Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.

Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.