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 ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

A story? No. No stories, never again.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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