The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,
It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.
The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
It’s a curious idea to reproduce when you don’t even like life.
If you control the children, you control the future.
The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.
Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.
Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.
A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.
To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.
He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.
The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.
…intimacy isn’t something men talk about. They may talk about politics, literature, stocks, or sports, depending on the man, but about their love lives they keep silent, even to their dying breath.
What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?’The response closest to the truth was probably something like ‘Nothing’; but it’s always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.
You can’t be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it’s not a fitting attitude.
The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.
I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.
Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That’s why I’m glad feminism is dead.