If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

A cat only has itself.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.