That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

the path of change is unpredictable.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

The province of philosophy is not so much to prevent calamities befalling as to demonstrate that they are blessings when they have taken place.

Lukewarm people do not live by faith; their lives are structured so that they don't have to.

More people are bribed by their own money than anybody else's.

I look at her wish we could go inside and make love on the couch. Dive inside each other. Take each other. Make each other. Nothing happens, though.

I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.