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.
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.
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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.
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.