“What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

My library is an archive of longings.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

How boring just to be a body.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

Life is beautiful, but you don’t have a clue.

Beauty fades. Your spirit is forever.

The beauty and the scent of roses can be used as a medicine and the sun rays as a food.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.

Nothing more beautiful than taking a nap with my children.