In a major matter no details are small.

When you are obliged to make a statement that you know will cause displeasure, you must say it with every appearance of sincerity; this is the only way to make it palatable.

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 present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.