Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
What love lays bare in me is energy.
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.
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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...
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.