I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.