To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.