He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.