I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions