All publicity works upon anxiety.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

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

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

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.