Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

What we need is to use what we have.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

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.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.