I certainly didn’t concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other...

We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right...

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was...

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe...

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So,...

What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

Isn’t post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?

Camus and Henry waved to me from that muddy truck. They both wanted me to get over myself.So, this was me, getting over myself. And it was about time.

If there were a party of those who aren’t sure they’re right, I’d belong to it. ~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt)

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible...

Il faudrait vivre en spectateur de sa propre vie. Pour y ajouter le rêve qui l’achèverait. Mais on vit, et les autres rêvent votre vie.

Let us rejoice.

I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don’t really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward,...

In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are...

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

Je réclame l’indépendance dans l’interdépendance.

They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

I hope the dogs don’t bark tonight. I always think it’s mine

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.