I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

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

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

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.

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.