I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.

Sitting at the tables of cafés in the cities I visited, I found myself thinking that everything tasted to me of dreams, of emptiness. I sometimes found myself wondering if I was still sitting at the table of out old house, motionless and dazzled by dreams! I cannot promise you that this is not what is happening, that I am not still there now, that all this, including this conversation with you, is false and imaginary. Who are you, by the way? The absurd thing is that you don’t know either...

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as “flesh and blood.” In fact “flesh and blood” describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.