Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

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.

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

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

The work of memory collapses time.