When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais and a plate of string beans in vinaigrette for the equivalent of fifteen cents.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.