You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.

The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem.

We should distinguish between responsibility and guilt. Guilt only touches the ones who committed the crimes but the son of a criminal is not a criminal himself.

By the duty to be happy, I thus refer to the ideology... that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure...on the one hand, we have to make the most of our lives; on the other, we have to be sorry and punish ourselves if we don't succeed in doing so. This is a perversion of a very beautiful idea: that everyone has a right to control his own destiny and to improve his life.

The cult of happiness turns into a huge concern which to my opinion is exactly contrary to what happiness should be: a paradise of enchantment.

Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.

An overblown conscience is an empty conscience.