« Unconditional love responds to one of the deepest nostalgic desires, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, being loved by virtue of its value, its merits, always leaves room for doubt; whether it is because I have displeased the person I wanted to love or for any other reason, I still live in continual fear that love will disappear. Moreover, a "deserved" love may generate the bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, but only because one pleases, in short that one is not loved at all but used. Therefore, it is not surprising that all of us, children and adults alike, cling to the nostalgic desire for maternal love. Most children have fortunately the chance to enjoy this love `...` In adults, on the other hand, this same nostalgic desire is much more difficult to fill. In the case of a particularly favorable development, it integrates as a component in normal erotic love; often it borrows religious forms, more frequently neurotic forms. »

« But, in addition to learning theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to become a master in any art - mastery of art must be the object of ultimate concern; it is important that nothing in the world matters more than art. This applies to music, medicine, carpentry - and to love. »

« To its ultimate degree, this attempt to know confines itself to sadism, desire and the ability to make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to betray his secret in his suffering. In this impetuous desire to penetrate the secret of man, his own and therefore ours, lies an essential motivation of cruelty and destruction in that they have profound and intense. Isaac Babel put this idea very succinctly. He quotes the case of an officer, during the civil war in Russia, who has just trampled to death his previous master: "When you shoot - I will say it so - when you shoot, you just get rid of a guy... By pulling you never reach the soul, where it is in a guy, or the way it manifests itself. But I spare no spar, and more than once I trampled an enemy for more than an hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life is like in our country." This path to knowledge often appears clearly in children. They dismantle an object, demolish it in order to know it; or they disassemble an animal, cruelly plucking the wings of a butterfly to force its secret. This cruelty is in fact underpinned by a deeper motivation: the desire to know the secret of things and life. »