[...] most actors accept being loved for their celebrity without any problem, and why not? After all it’s part of themselves, of their most authentic personality, or in any case the one they have chosen for themselves. By contrast, men who can accept that they are loved for their money are rare, in the West at least; the same cannot be said for Chinese shopkeepers. In the simplicity of their souls, Chinese shopkeepers consider that their S-Class Mercedes, their bathrooms with hydromassage showers, and more generally their money are part of themselves, and therefore they have no objection to arousing the enthusiasm of young girls through these material attributes, they have the same immediate, direct relationship with them that a Westerner can have with the beauty of his face—and in fact theirs makes even more sense, since, in a sufficiently stable politico-economic system, if it’s often the case that a man is stripped of his physical beauty by illness, if aging will in any case inevitably strip him of it, it is far less likely that he will be stripped of his villas on the Côte d’Azur, or of his S-Class Mercedes. It’s true, however, that I was a Western neurotic, and not a Chinese shopkeeper, and that in the complexity of my soul I far preferred to be appreciated for my humor than for my money, or even for my celebrity—for I was in no way certain, during an otherwise long and active career, that I had given the best of me, that I had explored all the facets of my personality, I was not an authentic artist in the sense that Vincent, for example, could be, because I knew all too well in my heart of hearts that there was nothing funny about life, but I had refused to take this into account, I had been a bit of a whore, in fact, I had adapted to the tastes of the public, I had never been really sincere, supposing that is possible, but I knew that you had to suppose it, and that if sincerity, in itself, is nothing, it is nevertheless the condition for everything else. Deep down, I knew that not one of my miserable sketches, not one of my lamentable scripts, mechanically stitched together, with the skill of a wily professional, to entertain an audience of bastards and monkeys, deserved to survive me. [...]