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.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

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

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.

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

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