I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.
We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
I’ve seen of enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s easy and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.
A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Life is the sum of your choices.
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.