Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
Paul de ManThe ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Paul de ManLiterature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
Paul de Man