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.

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.

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.