“To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?”

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Language is never innocent.

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.

Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

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

Only a Bush could answer a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question two different ways and be wrong both times.

The answer isn’t another pill. The answer is spinach.

You are a multiple choice exam and I have circled all the wrong answers.

Those sound like the three best answers I’ve ever heard on this show even though it’s the first ever of this show!

I was telling people if every time I answered a question about Multan I got a rupee, I would be a multimillionaire by now.

No matter what it is, I think people want the answer they want, they don’t want the truth.

But I have to add – and this answers your other question – this catholicity in time and in space is only meaningful for me if there is, at the same time, a concentration on the Gospel.

Be true to yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.