The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.