Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare — which is perhap….

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force..

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact..

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it….

To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat..

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It see….

A story? No. No stories, never again..

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on..

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the ….

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little..

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for t….

I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as fo….

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed).

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from be….

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated ….

Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them pro….

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when ….

My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for m….

As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was ne….

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought acc….

The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden,….