You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.

The US ... cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth ... it lives in a perpetual present. in the US everything human is artificial. The country is without hope. What is arresting here is ... both the absence of architecture in the cities and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.

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 Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.