"AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder."

"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."

"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."

"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."

"The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility."

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

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

"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs."

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

"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."

"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."

"Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals."

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

"Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."

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

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

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

"Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future."

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

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

"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."

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

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."

"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."

"Sanity is a cozy lie."

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

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

"To photograph is to confer importance."

"Books are funny little portable pieces of thought."

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

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

"Lying is an elementary means of self-defense."

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

"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."

"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."

"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."

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

"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything."

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

"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams."

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

"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."

"Lying is the most simple form of self-defence."

"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."

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

"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."

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

"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."

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