The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare — which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.