The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

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.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.