Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.

The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.