A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.

You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.