Emil Cioran Quotes

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

I won't do any print interviews anymore. No matter what I say, it gets distorted.

I don't mind being asked anything! Not at all. I tell you what is annoying, is when you say something and somebody writes something that's completely different to what you said, and you're like, 'well that's not nice, because that's not what happened.'

If you don't speak Spanish, then don't accuse me of insulting you in that language, let alone insulting you ten times.

I don't want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me... Just too much risk.

The problem with merely writing so that you can be understood is that the wrong people, in advancing their agendas, are only too ready to misunderstand you. Writing so that you cannot be misunderstood anticipates and preempts those who would willfully distort what you are trying to say.

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?

I may have exaggerated a bit when I said that 80 per cent of the top 100 women are fat pigs. What I meant to say was 75 per cent of the top 100 women are fat pigs.

I improve on misquotation.

When people sometimes misquote me, I don't know if they understand what I'm saying.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

You could put it that way if you wanted to cause people concern. On the other hand, you could report it as I said it.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

I hate seeing myself misquoted.

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

Leaving people to jumped conclusions is sometimes simpler than explaining a complicated truth

To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

People are always misquoting me.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.