It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.