Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

I don't panic unless I have to. Wastes energy.

I love thee, as the good love heaven.

Nobody I know got killed in South Central LA. Today was a good day.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

Devotion is the spark that can fire up your chemistry and energy to such a level that it creates an explosion of ecstasy within you.

Barack Obama says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. But they're two different worlds.

I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.

It is good to love in a moderate degree; to distraction, it is not good; but to love to entire distraction, is the thing that my master's doing.

Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

You can crush a man with journalism.