“If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.”

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.