The most implacable enemies of culture — Rimbaud, Lautréamont, dadaism, surrealism — end up being assimilated and absorbed by it. They all wanted to … - Eugène Ionesco

Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.

What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.

I had a little ginger cat. I found him in a field, stolen from his mother, a real wild cat. He
was two weeks old, maybe a little more, but he already knew how to scratch and bite. I
fed him and petted him and took him home. He became the sweetest cat. Once, he hid in
the sleeve of a visitor’s coat. He was the most polite creature, a real prince. When we
came home in the middle of the night, he would come greet us, his eyes all sleepy. Then
he’d go back to sleep in our bed. One time the door was closed to our bedroom — he tried
to open it, he pushed it with his behind, and he got angry and he made a beautiful noise.
He shunned us for a week. He was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. He was really a
cowardly cat, defenseless, a poet cat. Once we brought him a toy mouse and he hid
under the cabinet. We wanted him to experience the outside world. We put him on the pavement right outside the window. He was so scared. There were pigeons all around
and he was frightened of pigeons. He meowed with despair, pressed against the wall.
All animals and all other cats were strange creatures that he mistrusted or enemies that
he feared. He was only happy with us. We were his family. He thought we were cats
and cats were something else. But still, one day, he went out on his own. The big dog
next door killed him. He was lying there like a cat doll, a puppet ripped open with an
eye gouged out and a paw torn off, like a stuffed animal damaged by a sadistic child.

I had a dream about him. He was in the fireplace, lying on the embers. Marie was
surprised he didn’t burn. I said, “Cat’s don’t burn. They’re fireproof.” He came out of
the fireplace, meowing in a cloud of smoke. But it wasn’t him — it was another cat, ugly
and fat and female. Like his mother, the wildcat. He looked like Marguerite.

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.