“I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.”

“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”

“‎I don't suffer from dissociative identity disorder but my other personalities do.”

“The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of scepticism with faith.”

“I said that great men had a sense of history. But when you say you have a great sense of history it does not follow that you are great.”

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”