We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities - courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning - whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.

If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Smile and others will smile back.

Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood.