The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.