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.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

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

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.