“A life, whose purpose is money, is death.”

“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”

“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.”

“Having money is a way of being free of money”

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

“Poverty is a state whose feature is generosity.”

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”