We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

It was the only way to progress, to stop.

I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.