To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.

If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?