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.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.