Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.

Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories.

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.

And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat – that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear – and even, in certain respects, would be – the most modern of critical movements.

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.