If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references.