Tzvetan Todorov, A Final Interview

[...]there was a Russian literary tradition, and also Russian translations of writers who wrote in English, French, German, and other languages. When I became a French citizen, I became a citizen of the country that I inhabited. [...]in becoming a father and in wanting to assume the responsibilities of a father, I committed myself to being present in my life, because it is a powerful experience, and I wanted there to be a connection between what I was living and what I was thinking about. [...]I used to consider the 20th century to be a bit like a parenthesis during the course of which there was this experimentation, with something that was supposed to provide a remedy to democracy in order to make it better, to replace it with something better. [...]we are dealing with a text written by another person. [...]at this time, I came to the conviction that the real transformation of the Renaissance in the domain of painting was not what the word "Renaissance" indicates.