I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion

The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.