Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.
In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
X, n. In our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language.
