“The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.”

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.