Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).