Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.