Glenn Gould’s maxim, which I’ve copied so often into so many successive notebooks: ‘The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.’

yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

At length I explained to him that life had brought me to a dead end from which there was no exit, and that the only way out for me was suicide. When you say something like that, you expect to be contradicted. But instead of contradicting me, Roustang had said softly: ‘You’re right. Suicide doesn’t get very good press these days, but sometimes it’s

The misery we’ve all experienced when, sitting on the crapper in the cold, yellow light of a sleepless night, we think about the noble image we desperately try to convey to others, and the horrible truth of what really dwells within us, in the secrecy of our hearts and our crappers. Fear, shame and hatred: the grand trinity. That’s something we all

Take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish War, of Goethe, of Fonk’s trial, of the Last Judgement, of your superiors – and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses

There’s a sentence by Schopenhauer that makes me laugh a lot: ‘The best way to think smart things is not to think twaddle.’

They lie for twenty-odd years the way Jean-Claude Romand – whose devastating story I spent seven years writing – did, and then they end up massacring their family, wife, children, parents and dog, because now that we’ve come this far into the void, that’s all there’s left to do.

Mr and Mrs Térieur had two boys, twins. What did they call them? Alex and Alain. I love that joke. In French Alex Térieur means ‘on the outside’, and Alain Térieur means ‘on the inside’. And with every book I write, there’s always a moment when I think it could be called The Brothers Térieur.

When asked ‘Why is man on earth?’ Pythagoras answered: ‘To observe the heavens.’