History can only be interpeted if one admits that man ha...

History can  only be interpeted if one admits that man has been marked by evil since the beginning. He is condemned, he's cursed. The profoundest book that was ever written is the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis. Everything is said there. The whole vision of human destiny, of man. The very fact that God is afraid of man, that's what is so fantastic.

There's an amazing story in the Koran: when man made his appearance on earth a fish came up aout of the water and a vulture came down from the sky, and they said, 'The danger has come', the catastrophe. And the fish dived down to the bottom of the waters and the vulture flew away into the sky.

Man is accursed. History is at once demonaic and tragic, the whole history of the world.

[Ionescu] is a profoundly unhappy man, and success has only aggravated his misery. Which is what I like about him. Instead of coming to terms with life, he has never despaired as much as since he's been famous. For years we spoke on the phone almost daily. One can die of laughter with him, even when he's in despair. He's a man who is haunted by the idea of death, much more than I. With age, for me, this obsession has grown weaker. With him, it's the contrary. It's not that he's afraid to die. He has a sense of the ephemeral, of things not lasting, and his work is an expression of it. One might even say that is humour is somewhat the disconsolation of dying.

[...] I developed an interetst not so much in religion itself as in mystics. Not because of their religious faith but for their excess, their passion, their inner violence. So I began to read the great mystics, and I soon understood that I could not have faith. But it interested me because the mystics lived a more intense life than others. And too, becfuase of their kind of extraordinary pride, me and God, God and me.

Each one of us obviously knows extreme states of solitude, where nothing exists anymore, especially at night when one is absolutely alone and there is always the difficulty of speaking with oneself. So, I've defined God as the partner in moments of extreme solitude. One thinks of God when one can think of nothing else anymore, of no other person. It has nothing to do with faith in my case, it's solely a pretext for dialgoue. It's a monologue, but because everything else has vanished, one clashes with God, the last companion in solitude.

The existence of God doesn't even interest me.

Yes, why do [the mystics] write, since they're writing for God. God doesn't read.

I should have been a sage, but I couldn't. I wanted to be one, but I couldn't manage it, so I wrote books. Everything I've done has been the result of a spiritual failure. But for me, that's not necessarily a negative concept.