I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

We are all mediators, translators.

Beyond the touchline there is nothing.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.