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

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.

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 more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

I became a feminist upon the realization that, whether physical, mental, or emotional, everything involved in obtaining love and approval from men required some form of self-mutilation.

The sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart. And being thoughtful and being generous. Everything else is crap.

The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.

There are very few things in my life that I can't have if I want them. So when I see something that I can't have, immediately I'm obsessed by it.

When Blacks got the right to vote, white women got the right to sit on juries.

For plague and pestilence, plunder and pollution, the hazards of nature and the hunger of children are the foes of every nation. The earth, the sea and the air are the concern of every nation.

Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly, our options widen.

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

I don't want to be shut out from the truth. If they ban books, they might as well lock us away from the world.

Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.