• 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.
• The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
• Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
• Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
• Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
• I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
• The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
• Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism.
• For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
• Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
• The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
• The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
• A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
• Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
• It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
• A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
• Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
• The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
• It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
• Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
• Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism-victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
