The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.