Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.
To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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.
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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.
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
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.
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
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.
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.
Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
Le toucher est le plus de mystificateur de tous les sens, a' la diffe rence de la vue, qui est le plus magique. Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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.