What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.

I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy.

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.

If you're being true to who you are, and the things you believe in, that is so attractive to me.

Everybody wants to be winners - you have to trust that God has a greater plan for this even when you can't see it.