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.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.