“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.

The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

You can make anything by writing.

You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.

My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.