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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.

God's word is alive, so full of spiritual truth and wisdom that even a single passage can be digested for a lifetime

The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others.

Every time we deny ourselves in order to serve someone else, we grow in Christ.

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

I certainly went into losing my virginity terrified. Going on stage, I could only have imagined the worst possible outcomes. And then it went fine.

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film.

Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.

I remember the horror story that I told myself over and over again. I'm totally alone in my body. I'm totally alone in my head and nobody will ever see through my eyes. I'm just completely alone.