Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.