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

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

There are no specific diseases only specific disease conditions.

I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs. I’ve been on both sides of it all, I guess. So there’s not one specific event or thought that I’m dealing with or drawing from necessarily.

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.

You can’t overthink the music. Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured. The blues isn’t about structure; it’s what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.

The First Amendment was specifically designed for citizens to insult politicians. Libel laws were written to protect law students speaking out on political issues from getting called whores by Oxycontin addicts.

You can’t have a one-size-fits-all mind-set when it comes to effective leadership. You need to tailor a specific approach to every single person on your team in order to get the most out of them.

I couldn’t say a specific thing, but the media is not really held to high standards anymore.

From childhood, I had been instructed in the tablaa by my father, along with the astaais and antaraas specific to our Gharana.