I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

We are our choices.

Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.

I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

As we witness the death of departed souls, other people will observe our departure from the world.

Evil triumphs when good men refuse to call it evil

This revolution is for display purposes only.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

Tears are another river that takes us home. We become alive with tears. There isn't a chance to return to sleep when we are weeping.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

Why waste precious time and energy trying to be someone you're not when you can put it to much better use simply being yourself?

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

It is the human things that make life good, the unexpected kindness, the friendly note, the bracing word, the neighbour's extra loaf of bread she leaves at our back door.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.