“I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.”

Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

If you want to get your point across, you gotta cuss.

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

At one point I thought changing my name might help with privacy, but that was before the Internet.

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

Research can be interesting, but it can be pointless as well. The realities of making a movie often are not conducive with that. I’m not knocking it. I love doing research myself, but I admit it doesn’t always add to the performance.

As the Chinese will tell you, history depends on your point of view.