The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre.
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.
Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.
Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.