Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

To whom can I put this question (with any hopes of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought... ?

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Suicide How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

Every exploration is an appropriation.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.