Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Art is a form of consciousness.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

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.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Love dies because its birth was an error.