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

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.

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.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

Art is a leap into the dark.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Sex and art are the same thing.

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.