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...
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.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
Why is it better to last than to burn?
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.