"You approach your text somewhat as if it were a magical puzzle"

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style and think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style—which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite—is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.

What distinguishes literature from scientific communication, for example, is that it is not unambiguous; the artist of language arranges words in such a way that, depending on how he emphasizes or gives weight to them, they will have one meaning, and another, and yet another, each time at different levels.

Q: You said to me once, around 1971: "It is time that I finally told the truth." You added: "But I could only tell it in a work of fiction." What was the reason for this?

At that time I was thinking of writing a story in which I wanted to present in an indirect manner everything that I had been previously thinking of saying in a kind of political testament, which would have been the continuation of my autobiography and which I had decided not to do. The fictional element would have been minimal; I would have created a character about whom the reader would have been forced to say: "The man presented here is Sartre."

Which does not mean that for the reader there would have been an overlapping of the character and the author, but that the best way of understanding the character would have been to look for what came to him from me. That is what I would have wanted to write: a fiction that was not a fiction. This simply represents what it means to write today. We know ourselves very little, and we are still not able to give ourselves completely to each other. The truth of writing would be for me to say: "I take up the pen, my name is Sartre, this is what I think."

Q: Can't a truth be expressed independently of the person who expresses it?

It is no longer interesting then. It removes the individual and the person from the world and goes no farther than objective truths. One can attain objective truths without thinking of one's own truth. But if it is a question of speaking of both one's objectivity and the subjectivity that is behind this objectivity, and which is just as much a part of the man as his objectivity, at this point it is necessary to write: "I, Sartre." And, as this is not possible at the present time, because we do not know each other well enough, the detour of fiction allows for a more effective approach to this objective-subjective totality.

Q: Would you say then that you have come closer to your own truth through Roquentin or Mathieu than in writing Les Mots?

Probably, or rather, I think that Les Mots is no truer than La Nausée or Les Chemins de la Liberté. Not that the facts I report are not true, but Les Mots is a kind of novel also, a novel that I believe in, but that nevertheless remains a novel.

—New York Review of Books,
interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, 1975