Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

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?

Keep up with what's causing chaos in your own field.

One of the primary reasons we don't seek counsel from the wise people around us is that we already know what we are going to hear--and we just don't want to hear it.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

I learned the cello , but I would still need a massive amount of practice. But I do play classical music, so I understand where that comes from.

If you have a vision, no matter how difficult things are, everything just becomes a process.

I like to think I'm just talkin' in my defense.

Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.

Whoever grows angry amid troubles applies a drug worse than the disease and is a physician unskilled about misfortunes.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.