Quote collection
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment."
"So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it."
"I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind."
"Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?"
"Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident"
"The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe."
"Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter."
"Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations."
"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."
"Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear."
"The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is."
"I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment."
"That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?"
"For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously."
"For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it."
"Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together."
"It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind."
"To whomever gives a kiss or a blow Render a kiss or blow But to whomever gives when you are unable to return Offer all the hatred in your heart For you were slaves and he enslaves you"
"I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."
"So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral."