“Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. ”

“Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.”

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on aglobe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one countryto another—human life cannot in any way be limited to the closedsystems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travailof recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could beexpressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems;at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaningonly from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberateand lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to any thingone can account for. It is only by such insubordination—even if it isimpoverished—that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditionalsplendor of material things.”

“America is the only civilization in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization”