“I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences.”

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Nothingness haunts Being.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Your judgement judges you and defines you.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

I was writing with my homegirl who’s one of my favorite people to work with. We were just sitting in a studio and I said, I want to be able to talk about sex, but very specific kinds of sex.

What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.

The only ones who make things change are fanatics. If you’re not a fanatic around here, you can’t cut it.

Whatever one may do, one is always alone in the world.

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

One finds great comfort in good dinners.