Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.