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

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

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

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color.

I return my tax bill without paying it. My reason for doing so is that women suffer taxation yet have not representation.

There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.

If somebody’s going to represent our music live, I’d like to see it represented with excellence and spectacularly and with really great musicianship.

Rocky’ represents the optimistic side of life, and ‘Rambo’ represents purgatory.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Jake Green isn’t just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film’s world of cons and games.

When it comes to diversity, women are still underrepresented in so many different places, but one place we’re not underrepresented is we hold a majority of the household income, and we control that.