“Every word written is a victory against Death. ”

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”

“Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over.‘One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,’ says Sugar. ‘It saves time and paper.’ Seeing that the child is unconvinced, she adds, ‘If books were written in such a way that every person, no matter how young, could understand everything in them, they would be enormously long books. Would you wish to read a book that was a thousand pages long, Sophie?’Sophie answers without hesitation.‘I would read a thousand million pages, Miss, if all the words were words I could understand.”

“Between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the US Constitution is no longer worth the paper it's written on.”

“The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated...”

“It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”

“[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.”