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

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.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.

I don't like guys who will lie down and take it. I want someone who'll fight back. I like people who can argue well.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

The lie is a condition of life.

When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.

No lie ever reaches old age.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

It is all right for the lion and the lamb to lie down together if they are both asleep, but if one of them begins to get active, it is dangerous.

I can't believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can't believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.