“Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.”

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

Why is it better to last than to burn?

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.

To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

I don’t remember the specific ones she used, but I remember the bottles.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Certain things just happen and it’s undeniable, you just go that way. But I don’t have a specific path I’m following, I’m just playing it by ear.

If you could make the world exactly to your liking, consider very specifically just how that world would be. If you could spend your time doing precisely what you wish, how would the moments of your life be lived?

The term ‘globalisation’ is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.

I don’t have a specific plan except for as long as people want to listen to me talk, I’m going to keep talking. I can’t imagine a life without doing standup.

Boxing is limited fighting with a specific rule set. Fighting is true, where you can do anything.