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

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 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.

Don’t complain against life, it may hear you and double your suffering

I wanted to break the record, of course, and become the youngest person to sail around the world solo and unassisted.

I try to stay out of the public eye as much as possible because I want people to be able to watch my films and not be distracted.

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.

I know my boundaries. I know the limits to the car.

I do have a 22-inch waist, I will say that.

The hardest thing about being a communist is trying to predict the past.

My daughter told me she wasn't afraid of spider but that she was afraid of my smoking. She said that she was afraid of my dying.

When our emotions are engaged, we often have trouble seeing things as they are.

It was the same thing in the army, no respect. They gave me a uniform that glowed in the dark.