To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.
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!
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 realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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.
Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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.
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
Every exploration is an appropriation.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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.
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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.
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.