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.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.