For me, dressing is always a question of principle, respect, a sense of order, not to disguise myself, even in rotten places.

When you believe in what you are doing, when you are seeking justice for the killing of Daniel Pearl, when you want to alert public opinion to the plight of the massacred people of Darfur, or in the recently martyred former Soviet republic Georgia, it makes more sense to use the media than to work in silence.

Even if it doesn't sound like it at first, that's an identity that Europe can go out into the world with and take a leading role.

The European Union should not be prescribing an identity. We know what that's like, when a government tells its people how it should look; what it should be doing. That's the first step towards totalitarianism.

I work even when I am on vacation. You know that line by Stéphane Mallarmé, "All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book"? I am the kind of person who finds life interesting only if it is translated into writing, if it is parsed into words.

I don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.

Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.