Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.