“Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.”

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

I used the word ‘prose’ in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.

One’s life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d’you know, it’s most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

Lobbying is the world’s second – oldest profession.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

Superstition has its practical uses.

It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.

Religion without science is superstition. Science without religion is materialism.

Although I myself don’t go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it’s superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.