As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We’re a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.