“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”

“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.”

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.”

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”

“Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.”

“The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions.”