One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.

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?

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

There is no shame in confusion or fear. "There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. . . . It was the silence that betrayed us."

I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)

Every Saturday we work in the yard, pick up the dog doo, hope that it's hard.

A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.

Are you entitled to the fruits of your own labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?

The quest for truth must be carried out by each person individually. It is like breathing, something which no one else can do for us.

There's time limits on how long people's attention spans will work. There's six weeks in each territory that you're really famous, then you, thank god, disappear again.

I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [...] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal.

Doing for others may be the only way to create lasting well-being.