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

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

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

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

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 from it.

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

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 for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

A story? No. No stories, never again.

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. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.