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.

The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

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

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].