One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is.