To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing