I wasn't with Joseph, but I believe him. My faith did not come to me through science, and I will not permit so-called science to destroy it.

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself.

A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths.

a person who thinks should not try to persuade others to his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the man of conviction; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the man of conviction is a man restricted.

to be absolutely modern means: never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation.

Too much faith is the worst ally

people do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! the whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a hemingway or an orwell.

I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means i ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility.