It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

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