The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.

Nothing exists except through language.

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

History does not belong to us; we belong to it.