“Why is it better to last than to burn?”

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.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

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.

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

They say we die twice – once when the last breath leaves our body and once when the last person we know says our name.

The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I’ve parodied over the years.

I occasionally get birthday cards from fans. But it’s often the same message: They hope it’s my last.

Living every moment as if it was our first and last is a genuine life of gratitude, acceptance and wisdom.

It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon.

It’s funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can’t even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

When life is good do not take it for granted as it will pass.

I have spent six years in prison, the last six years. Even if I was outside the prison, how much actual space was there for an investigative journalist to do his work in Iran?