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Apart from a few minor differences, I found a great resemblance between his attitude and my own. There was nothing worldly in his ambitions. He reproved me for making use of religious vocabulary, but he, too, was really seeking ‘salvation’ in literature; books brought into this deplorably non-essen…

He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional liteiary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements’, careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having…

We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as…

‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was…

‘From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,’ Sartre told me when he had brought me the news that I had passed. He had a liking for feminine friendships. The first time I had ever seen him, at the Sorbonne, he was wearing a hat and talking animatedly to a great gawk of a woman student who I t…