“My library is an archive of longings.”

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.

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.

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.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.

I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.