Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

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

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood