“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

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 am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

You know what I’m going to have on my gravestone? ‘She did it the hard way.’

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

Prevention of birth is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away or a life that is coming to birth.

He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.

Prevention of birth is a precipitation of murder.