Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

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.