It is always more valuable to report the truth.
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don’t want to change the world; you want to blow it up.
I don’t know. Everything. Living. Smoking.
It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.
Perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action. The world is revealed as an “always future hollow”, for we are always future to ourselves.
One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.
What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
A good hanging now and then – that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.
Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.
For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.
Therefore, in the nature of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgement on those who seek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence.
Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
I know only one Church: it is the society of men.
The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.
A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.
With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.
A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.