“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

My library is an archive of longings.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

How boring just to be a body.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Whatever you believe, that you will be. If you believe yourselves to be sages, sages you will be tomorrow. There is nothing to obstruct you.

Whether sage or fool, we must all struggle with life.