There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.