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.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

The work of memory collapses time.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.