Quote collection
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile."
"Heroism is not to be won at the point of a pen."
"God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man."
"My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep."
"In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect."
"To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love."
"Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object."
"In a country lacking leaders, in Africa, for instance, how could a native educated in Europe refuse to become a professor, even at the price of his literary vocation?"
"In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing."
"Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing."
"Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did."
"The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent."
"All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image."
"Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel."
"Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content."
"I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out."
"What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality."
"Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb."
"The recent experiences of pocketbooks prove this. I have changed my public since my works have been published in a smaller format."
"At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party."