“What love lays bare in me is energy.”

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

I watch her blond head until it disappears around the bend, and I feel bare, like there’s nothing left to protect me against pain. Her absence stings worst of all.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

As if some dreadful fate would overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our fearful clinging to illusion.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

I wouldn’t have believed it. I still barely do, truthfully. I’m so continually fortunate that I keep coming across these smart, interesting, creative people who pick me. It’s just stupendous.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

From ages 10 to 12 or so, I barely remember anything.