Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.

That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society to retreat ahead of it.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal.

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

It was also during my tenure of office that the Japanese Government agreed to the conclusion of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed it, pursuing a policy in harmony with the avowed desire of the people.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.