There is no language without deceit.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.