If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.