“A picture is never anything but its own plural description.”

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

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 purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.

Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.

The World is Large – Its beauty indescrible.

Why is it that you have more practice describing weaknesses than strengths? It’s not your fault they never went to the lengths to teach you how to value your strengths.

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.

Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.