“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.”

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.

When I fart my ass makes a trumpet sound that heralds the arrival of the smell.

Maybe the social value of truth is as a destination – so long as we do not assume we have arrived there.

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and torture.

If you meditate and the Devil comes, make the Devil meditate.

It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.

That which prematurely arrives at perfection soon perishes.

But when the morning arrives we will be all right.

It always comes back to you, when I turn away you’re in my rear view; life twists and turns arriving at pastures new, but still it always comes back to you.