What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.