Literature Quotes

"Writing is the most dangerous supplement to presence."

"Reading is an act of responsibility toward the other."

"Interpretation is infinite; no text ever closes upon itself."

"To write is to defer presence indefinitely."

"Reading the other ethically means accepting their irreducibility."

"The text is always haunted by what it excludes."

"To read is to participate in an endless interpretive process."

"To read carefully is to honor the alterity of the text."

"To write is to reach that point where only something impersonal and neutral remains."

"Minor literature is defined not by language but by political commitment and collective value."

"The author is not the origin of the work; authorship is a function that can be dispersed."

"Literature should stammer, stutter, and break language in order to say the unsayable."

"Minor literature does not exist in a major language; it is the use of language against itself."

"To write is to make a line of flight, to escape the organized and the organized's attempt to recapture."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"We are always already within the text."

"Writing is the violence of letting the other speak."

"We are saved and condemned by writing."

"The text is a tissue of traces."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric—yet silence is complicity."

"Literature that does not disturb has already been assimilated."

"A book is not a communication of information; it is more like the initiation of a process that only the reader can complete."

"The pen is not an instrument of communication; it is an instrument of becoming."

"We must learn to read with the whole body."

"Every text is a door that opens onto infinite interpretations."

"To write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric—yet silence itself becomes complicity."

"The death of the author is the birth of bureaucratic interpretation."

"Literature is the record of human experience."

"The novel is the highest form of democratic art."

"Language is not merely one of man's possessions in the world; it is an expression of the condition of being human."