Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.