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

- Paul De Man

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

- Paul De Man

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.

- Paul De Man

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

- Paul De Man

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

- Paul De Man

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true pres…

- Paul De Man

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot c…

- Paul De Man

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

- Paul De Man

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

- Paul De Man