“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

To be naked is to be oneself.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

There’s one major difference between James Bond and me. He is able to sort out problems!

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

Green’ issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security.

The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.