« The euro is a note of Monopoly, without date, no place or currency, ghostly illustration of an intangible no man's land. The dollar embodies a memory and a territory, with a geography, a genealogy (the Founding Fathers) and a metaphysics (in God We trust). »

« culture is theft, since we all live on borrowing as well as inheritance. New connections as well as reseables. The fact remains that we are all involuntary incardinates, the 'despite us' of a parentage. In Ireland, where a recruit who admits to being an atheist was asked by her corporal if he was a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist, there would be no risk of finding a Presbyterian member of the IRA or a Catholic parading with the Orangemen. We will never dismantle and denounce enough the "substantial illusion", this house arrest that makes each individual prisoner of his ethnicity or his god. »

« For bodies and souls, the struggle of slowness against speed, a real issue of survival, has been linked, in our civilization, with the capacities of literary time to resist the strobe lights of image and sound. If this line of defense gives way, it is the victory of the gondola and the bus ass. How to escape the increasingly hellish cadences of fast food, fast thinking, etc., to consume on the spot and in the blink of an eye? In all-info, forbidden digression, not recommended loitering, time is money. Along with painting and sculpture, literature appears as one of the most powerful decelerating machines. Despite the formulas of so-called rapid reading, sampling and pecking, despite digests and extracts, the time of reading remains incompressible, like that of the rotation of the Moon and the Sun. To get from Paris to Madrid, we take a hundred times less time than a contemporary of Cervantes, but to read Don Quixote from side to side, we put in about the same time. The inner time of the poetic meditation of existence (...) has escaped the means of locomotion. This monstrous, irretrievable shift does not make reading the classics very convenient, but can make it attractive, by contrast, and increasingly valuable for the physical and mental rebalancing of our organisms destabilized by inconsistency and effervescence. The present has swelled. He became obese. He ate the past and the future. Deflating it is a necessity - and a pleasure. The media operate with stimulation without memory and impacts without a future; literature loosens the moment, and puts syntax where we get used to a rhapsody of surprises without opportunities or consequences. The computer reduces the depth of time, an author's book takes its time. This is a maximum of duration in a minimum volume - with a time-to-space ratio, as they say quality/price, so far unbeatable" (page 130-131) »