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.

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.

Not all vampires are created equal, you know.

Everyone stumbles at one time or another. It's the human condition

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Any other woman who has to go to work and pick up the kids and make dinner - that's way harder than what I have to do.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

Lookin' back is a bad habit.

It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can't dodge a fly.

l have no fear of change as such and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.