Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

Great men are not born great, they grow great . . .

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.- Don Corleone

I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time

—You have never known a Woman’s body! —I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...

To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.

Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

[T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

Ci che reclamo vivere la piena contraddizione del mio tempo, che mai cos bene ha reso al sarcasmo la condizione della verit .

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.