“Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.”

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Language is never innocent.

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.

Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

You somehow have to kill yourself. This is asked of people who haven’t got the tools to understand that it’s all a social construction, and that they shouldn’t inferiorize themselves.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success.

Once we decided to do a tower in New York, it had to say something about our group, reflecting the mix of modernity and creativity in our organization. It’s a symbol.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

I was walking down the street the other day and these construction workers were working on the roof hammering away. One of them told me I was a paranoid lunatic… in morse code.

I was in tailoring business, I sold flowers on the street, I worked construction and many odd jobs.

Success is a project that’s always under construction.