A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays