The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.