The Art of Joy

Why that eternal glorification of youth? The young work, produce, bear children, go to war, all before gaining self-awareness. But at forty, at fifty years of age, a human being - if he hasn't perished in the incessant social war - becomes dangerous: he poses questions, he demands freedom, rest, joy.

...women are women's enemy, just as men are.

Either you lie completely, or you tell everything.

Embroidering makes women stupid.

...we fall in love because over time we get bored with ourselves and we want to enter into someone else. ...later, once you've absorbed him, after you've fed on him until he's become part of you, you start to feel bored again.

There's a precise limit to helping others. Beyond that limit, invisible to many, there is only a desire to impose one own way of being...

If we are denied the right to die, the pressure of living becomes an atrocious prison.

The dead are wrong if no one defends them after their death.

I don't see why a spy shouldn't have a sister.

A first, false terror of turning thirty. What had I done? Had I wasted my days? Not enjoyed the sun and the sea to the fullest? Only later on, during the golden age of fifty, an age soundly vilified by poets and registry clerks - only then do you realize how much richness there is in the peaceful oases of being by yourself, alone. But that comes later.