“[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.”

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

“Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.”

“What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis.[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]”

“Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.”

“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.”

“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”