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A Man Never Forgets His Body The Way A Woman Does, Because A Man Is Pushing His Body, A Part Of His Body, Forward, To Make The Act Of Love Happen. He Brings The Jut Of His Body Into The Act Of Love, Then Takes It Back, When It Has Had Its Way.

-Susan Sontag

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A Man Never Forgets

Susan Sontag

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A Man Never Forgets His Body The Way A Woman Does, Because A Man Is Pushing His Body, A Part Of His Body, Forward, To Make The Act Of Love Happen. He Brings The Jut Of His Body Into The Act Of Love, Then Takes It Back, When It Has Had Its Way.

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The Principal Instances Of Mass Violence In The World Today Are Those Committed By Governments Within Their Own Legally Recognized Borders.

Left-wing Movements Have Tended To Be Unisex, And Asexual In Their Imagery. Right-wing Movements, However Puritanical And Repressive The Realities They Usher In, Have An Erotic Surface. Certainly Nazism Is "sexier" Than Communism.

I Make An Idol Of My Moral Consciousness. My Pursuit Of The Good Is Corrupted By The Sin Of Idolatry.

The Last Sentence Of A Book Is, Of Course, Where You Have To Stop.

In ‘life,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Work. In ‘work,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Life.

The Writer's First Job Is Not To Have Opinions But To Tell The Truth... And Refuse To Be An Accomplice Of Lies And Misinformation. Literature Is The House Of Nuance And Contrariness Against The Voices Of Simplification.

Instead Of Expecting All And Being Lowered Into Despair Each Time I Get Less, I Expect Nothing Now And, Occasionally, I Get A Little, And Am More Than A Little Happy.

One Can Be Serious About The Frivolous, Frivolous About The Serious.

A Photograph Comes Into Being, As It Is Seen, All At Once.

I Didn't Think Of Myself As Importing, I Thought It Was More Interesting To Write About Things People Didn't Know About Than What They Did. When I Became Aware That I Was In Fact "importing", I Stopped Doing It.

I Was Fascinated By Quotations And Lists. And Then I Noticed That Other People Were Fascinated By Quotations And Lists: People As Different As Borges And Walter Benjamin, Novalis And Godard.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

Any Critic Is Entitled To Wrong Judgments, Of Course. But Certain Lapses Of Judgment Indicate The Radical Failure Of An Entire Sensibility.

Standing Alone, Photographs Promise An Understanding They Cannot Deliver. In The Company Of Words, They Take On Meaning, But They Slough Off One Meaning And Take On Another With Alarming Ease.

... One Of Art Photography's Most Vigorous Enterprises--[is] Concentrating On Victims, On The Unfortunate--but Without The Compassionate Purpose That Such A Project Is Expected To Serve.

It's Not 'natural' To Speak Well, Eloquently, In An Interesting, Articulate Way. People Living In Groups, Families, Communes Say Little - Have Few Verbal Means. Eloquence - Thinking In Words - Is A Byproduct Of Solitude, Deracination, A Heightened Painful Individuality. In Groups, It's More Natural To Sing, To Dance, To Pray: Given, Rather Than Invented (individual) Speech.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

Surrealism Is A Bourgeois Disaffection; That Its Militants Thought It Universal Is Only One Of The Signs That It Is Typically Bourgeois.

Like The Collector, The Photographer Is Animated By A Passion That, Even When It Appears To Be For The Present, Is Linked To A Sense Of The Past.

War-making Is One Of The Few Activities That People Are Not Supposed To View 'realistically'; That Is, With An Eye To Expense And Practical Outcome. In All-out War, Expenditure Is All-out, Unprudent – War Being Defined As An Emergency In Which No Sacrifice Is Excessive.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellectual Upon Art.

If Tragedy Is An Experience Of Hyperinvolvement, Comedy Is An Experience Of Underinvolvement, Of Detachment.

Taste Has No System And No Proofs.

When Something Is Just Bad, It's Often Because It Is Too Mediocre In Its Ambition. The Artist Hasn't Attempted To Do Anything Really Outlandish.

Mad People = People Who Stand Alone And Burn. I'm Attracted To Them Because They Give Me Permission To Do The Same.

In Place Of A Hermeneutics We Need An Erotics Of Art.

The Unanimously Applauded, Self-congratulatory Bromides Of A Soviet Party Congress Seemed Contemptible. The Unanimity Of The Sanctimonious, Reality-concealing Rhetoric Spouted By American Officials And Media Commentators In Recent Days Seems, Well, Unworthy Of A Mature Democracy.

I Have Been Told That I Am A "natural" Feminist, Someone Who Was Born A Feminist. In Fact I Was Quite Blind To What The Problem Was: I Couldn't Understand Why Anyone Would Hesitate To Do What They Wanted To Do Just Because They Were Told That Women Didn't Do Such Things.

The Love Of The Famous, Like All Strong Passions, Is Quite Abstract. Its Intensity Can Be Measured Mathematically, And It Is Independent Of Persons.

Art Is The Most General Condition Of The Past In The Present. ... Perhaps No Work Of Art Is Art. It Can Only Become Art, When It Is Part Of The Past. In This Normative Sense, A 'contemporary' Work Of Art Would Be A Contradiction - Except So Far As We Can, In The Present, Assimilate The Present To The Past.

To Photograph Is To Appropriate The Thing Photographed. It Means Putting Oneself Into A Certain Relation To The World That Feels Like Knowledge-and Therefore, Like Power.

It Is A Nostalgic Time Right Now, And Photographs Actively Promote Nostalgia. Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos. ... All Photographs Are Memento Mori. To Take 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

I Want To Save My Soul, That Timid Wind.

Time Eventually Positions Most Photographs, Even The Most Amateurish, At The Level Of Art.

The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.

Unrequited Love

To The Militant, Identity Is Everything.

The Romantic Treatment Of Death Asserts That People Were Made Singular, Made More Interesting, By Their Illnesses.

I Like To Feel Dumb. That’s How I Know There’s More In The World Than Me.

I Envy Paranoids; They Actually Feel People Are Paying Attention To Them.

The Feminist Movement Has Been Important To Me Because It's Made Me Feel Less Odd And Also Because It Has Made Me Understand Some Of The Pressures On Women Which I Was Lucky Enough To Have Escaped, Perhaps Because Of My Eccentricity Or The Oddness Of My Upbringing.

Existence Is No More Than The Precarious Attainment Of Relevance In An Intensely Mobile Flux Of Past, Present, And Future.

Despite The Illusion Of Giving Understanding, What Seeing Through Photographs Really Invites Is An Acquisitive Relation To The World That Nourishes Aesthetic Awareness And Promotes Emotional Detachment.

Camp Taste Turns Its Back On The Good-bad Axis Of Ordinary Aesthetic Judgment. Camp Doesn't Reverse Things. It Doesn't Argue That The Good Is Bad, Or The Bad Is Good. What It Does Is To Offer For Art, And Life, A Different - A Supplementary - Set Of Standards.

Interpretation, Based On The Highly Dubious Theory That A Work Of Art Is Composed Of Items Of Content, Violates Art. It Makes Art Into An Article For Use, For Arrangement Into A Mental Scheme Of Categories.

Much Of Modern Art Is Devoted To Lowering The Threshold Of What Is Terrible. By Getting Us Used To What, Formerly, We Could Not Bear To See Or Hear, Because It Was Too Shocking, Painful, Or Embarrassing, Art Changes Morals.

The Writer Must Be Four People: 1) The Nut, The Obsede 2) The Moron 3) The Stylist 4) The Critic. 1 Supplies The Material; 2 Lets It Come Out; 3 Is Taste; 4 Is Intelligence.

All Great Art Contains At Its Center Contemplation, A Dynamic Contemplation.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers. The Question Is What To Do With The Feelings That Have Been Aroused, The Knowledge That Has Been Communicated. People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown — If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens — Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

The Photograph Is Like A Quotation, Or A Maxim Or Proverb. Each Of Us Mentally Stocks Hundreds Of Photographs, Subject To Instant Recall.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

All My Life I've Been Looking For Someone Intelligent To Talk To.

America Was Founded On A Genocide, On The Unquestioned Assumption Of The Right Of White Europeans To Exterminate A Resident, Technologically Backward, Colored Population In Order To Take Over The Continent.

Painters And Sculptors Under The Nazis Often Depicted The Nude, But They Were Forbidden To Show Any Bodily Imperfections. Their Nudes Look Like Pictures In Physique Magazines: Pinups Which Are Both Sanctimoniously Asexual And (in A Technical Sense) Pornographic, For They Have The Perfection Of A Fantasy.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

I Feel Inauthentic At A Party. ... Going To A Party Is A 'low' Activity - The Authentic Self Is Compromised, Fragmented - One Plays 'roles.' One Isn't Fully Present, Beyond Role-playing. One Doesn't (can't) Tell The Full Truth, Which Means One Is Lying, Even If One Doesn't Literally Tell Lies.

Modern Discussions Of The Possibility Of Tragedy Are Not Exercises In Literary Analysis; They Are Exercises In Cultural Diagnostics, More Or Less Disguised.

Photographed Images Do Not Seem To Be Statements About The World So Much As Pieces Of It, Miniatures Of Reality That Anyone Can Make Or Acquire

Gide And I Have Attained Such Perfect Intellectual Communion That I Experience The Appropriate Labor Pains For Every Thought He Gives Birth To!

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Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

The Easiest Thing In The World For Me Is To Pay Attention.

A Work Of Art, So Far As It Is A Work Of Art, Cannot - Whatever The Artist's Personal Intention - Advocate Anything At All.

When Comedy Fails, Seriousness Begins To Leak Back In.

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Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

The Photographer Is An Armed Version Of The Solitary Walker Reconnoitering, Stalking, Cruising The Urban Inferno, The Voyeuristic Stroller Who Discovers The City As A Landscape Of Voluptuous Extremes. Adept Of The Joys Of Watching, Connoisseur Of Empathy, The Flâneur Finds The World 'picturesque.

Authoritarian Political Ideologies Have A Vested Interest In Promoting Fear, A Sense Of The Imminence Of Takeover By Aliens And Real Diseases Are Useful Material.

Today Is Such A Time, When The Project Of Interpretation Is Largely Reactionary, Stifling. Like The Fumes Of The Automobile And Of Heavy Industry Which Befoul The Urban Atmosphere, The Effusion Of Interpretations Of Art Today Poisons Our Sensibilities. In A Culture Whose Already Classical Dilemma Is The Hypertrophy Of The Intellect At The Expense Of Energy And Sensual Capability, Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art.

Photographs Trade Simultaneously On The Prestige Of Art And The Magic Of The Real.

I'm Not Interested In Giving Aid And Comfort To The Neo-conservatives.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable. It Is Nowhere So Durable As Artistic Or Intellectual Beauty. Moral Beauty Has A Tendency To Decay Very Rapidly Into Sententiousness Or Untimeliness.

Most Writers I Know Have Switched To Word Processors. I Haven't But I'm Very Curious About Why People Like It So Much. I Think It Has Something To Do With The Fact That At Last Writing, Which Has Been Such An Old-fashioned, Artisanal Activity, Even On A Typewriter, Has Now Entered The Central Domain Of Modern Experience Which Is That Of Making Copies, Being Involved In The World Of Duplicates And Machine-mediated Activities.

Photography Is A Kind Of Overstatement, A Heroic Copulation With The Material World.

Surrealism In Painting Amounted To Little More Than The Contents Of A Meagerly Stocked Dream World: A Few Witty Fantasies, Mostly Wet Dreams And Agoraphobic Nightmares.

Any Disease That Is Treated As A Mystery And Acutely Enough Feared Will Be Felt To Be Morally, If Not Literally, Contagious.

One Man Thinks Before He Acts. Another Man Thinks After He Acts. Each Is Of The Opinon That The Other Thinks Too Much.

Nobody Ever Discovered Ugliness Through Photographs. But Many, Through Photographs, Have Discovered Beauty.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives.

A Family's Photograph Album Is Generally About The Extended Family And, Often, Is All That Remains Of It.

The Truth Of History Crowds Out The Truth Of Fiction - As If One Were Obliged To Choose Between Them.

I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

Conventions Vs. Spontaneity. This Is A Dialectical Choice, It Depends On The Assessment You Make Of Your Own Times. If You Judge That Your Own Time Is Ridden With Empty Insincere Formalities, You Plump For Spontaneity, For Indecorous Behavior Even...much Of Morality Is The Task Of Compensating For One's Age. One Assumes Unfashionable Virtues, In An Indecorous Time. In A Time Hollowed Out By Decorum, One Must School Oneself In Spontaneity.

Growing Older Is Mainly An Ordeal Of The Imagination-a Moral Disease, A Social Pathology.

Self-censorship, The Most Important And Most Successful Form Of Censorship, Is Rampant. Debate Is Identified With Dissent, Which Is In Turn Identified With Disloyalty. There Is A Widespread Feeling That, In This New, Open-ended Emergency, We May Not Be Able To 'afford' Our Traditional Freedoms.

I Write - And Talk - In Order To Find Out What I Think.

... The Place We Assign To Pornography Depends On The Goals We Set For Our Own Consciousness, Our Own Experience.

10 Percent Of Any Population Is Cruel, No Matter What, And 10 Percent Is Merciful, No Matter What, And The Remaining 80 Percent Can Be Moved In Either Direction.

The Particular Qualities And Intentions Of Photographs Tend To Be Swallowed Up In The Generalized Pathos Of Time Past.

If I Thought That What I'm Doing When I Write Is Expressing Myself, I'd Junk The Typewriter. Writing Is A Much More Complicated Activity That That.

To Read Was Precisely To Enter Another World, Which Was Not The Reader's Own, And Come Back Refreshed, Ready To Bear With Equanimity The Injustices And Frustrations Of This One. Reading Was Balm, Amusement Not Incitement.

It's Beginnings That Are Hard. I Always Begin With A Great Sense Of Dread And Trepidation. Nietzsche Says That The Decision To Start Writing Is Like Leaping Into A Cold Lake.

Kindness, Kindness, Kindness. I Want To Make A New Year's Prayer, Not A Resolution. I'm Praying For Courage.

... Liberal Intellectualstend To Have A Classical Theory Of Politics, In Which The State Has A Monopoly Of Power; Hoping Thatthose In Positions Of Authority May Prove To Be Enlightened Men, Wielding Power Justly, They Are Natural, If Cautious, Allies Of The "establishment.

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.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself.

Keeping A Journal

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

The Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

Art Is Not Consciousness Per Se, But Rather Its Antidote- Evolved From Within Consciousness Itself.

To Camp Is A Mode Of Seduction... Behind The 'straight' Public Sense In Which Something Can Be Taken, One Has Found A Private Zany Experience Of The Thing.

The Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.

Camp Is A Solvent Of Morality. It Neutralizes Moral Indignation, Sponsors Playfulness.

Moral Indignation

Mallarme Said That Everything In The World Exists In Order To End In A Book. Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

I'm Extremely Interested In The Russian Formalists And Have Been For Many Years. I'm More Drawn To Their Writing, Which Is Expressive And Literary, Than To Writing Which Is Extremely Academic Or Jargon-ridden.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

Everything Should Be Understood, And Anything Can Be Transformed - That Is The Modern View.

Some Of The Exuberance Of My Essay-writing Has Gone Because I'm Worried About The Uses They Could Serve.

Currently Intellectuals In Western Europe And North America Are Extremely Demoralized And Shaken By The Rise Of A Virulent Conservative Tendency (which Some Have Even Joined).

I Write In Spurts. I Write When I Have To Because The Pressure Builds Up And I Feel Enough Confidence That Something Has Matured In My Head And I Can Write It Down. But Once Something Is Really Under Way, I Don't Want To Do Anything Else. I Don't Go Out, Much Of The Time I Forget To Eat, I Sleep Very Little. It's A Very Undisciplined Way Of Working And Makes Me Not Very Prolific. But I'm Too Interested In Many Other Things.

The Wisdom Of Literature Is Quite Antithetical To Having Opinions. 'nothing Is My Last Word About Anything,' Said Henry James. Furnishing Opinions, Even Correct Opinions - Whenever Asked - Cheapens What Novelists And Poets Do Best, Which Is To Sponsor Reflectiveness, To Pursue Complexity. Information Will Never Replace Illumination.

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.

It Is Easier To Endure Than To Change. But Once One Has Changed, What Was Endured Is Hard To Recall.

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.

My Own View Is That One Cannot Be Religious In General Any More Than One Can Speak Language In General; At Any Given Moment One Speaks French Or English Or Swahili Or Japanese, But Not 'language.

When We're Afraid We Shoot. But When We're Nostalgic We Take Pictures.

The Creative Phase Of An Idea Coincides With The Period During Which It Insists, Cantankerously, On Its Boundaries, On What Makes It Different; But An Idea Becomes False And Impotent When It Seeks Reconciliation, At Cut-rate Prices, With Other Ideas.

Anything In History Or Nature That Can Be Described As Changing Steadily Can Be Seen As Heading Toward Catastrophe.

The Capacity To Be Overwhelmed By The Beautiful Is Astonishingly Sturdy And Survives Amidst The Harshest Distractions.

Al Forms Of Consensus About ''great'' Books And ''perennial'' Problems, Once Stabilized, Tend To Deteriorate Eventually Into Something Philistine. The Real Life Of The Mind Is Always At The Frontiers Of ''what Is Already Known.'' Those Great Books Don't Only Need Custodians And Transmitters. To Stay Alive, They Also Need Adversaries. The Most Interesting Ideas Are Heresies.

I Don't Write Easily Or Rapidly. My First Draft Usually Has Only A Few Elements Worth Keeping. I Have To Find What Those Are And Build From Them And Throw Out What Doesn't Work, Or What Simply Is Not Alive.

A Large Part Of The Popularity And Persuasiveness Of Psychology Comes From Its Being A Sublimated Spiritualism: A Secular, Ostensibly Scientific Way Of Affirming The Primacy Of "spirit" Over Matter.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart. It Enlarges Your Sense Of Human Possibility What Human Nature Is Of What Happens In The World. It's A Creator Of Inwardness.

Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response. Nothing Is More Decisive. There Is Taste In People, Visual Taste, Taste In Emotion - And There Is Taste In Acts, Taste In Morality. Intelligence, As Well, Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

Most People In This Society Who Aren't Actively Mad Are, At Best, Reformed Or Potential Lunatics.

Needing To Have Reality Confirmed And Experience Enhanced By Photographs Is An Aesthetic Consumerism To Which Everyone Is Now Addicted. Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution.

People Robbed Of Their Past Seem To Make The Most Fervent Picture Takers, At Home And Abroad.

The Writers Or Artists I Write About Are Not Necessarily Those I Care Most About (shakespeare Is Still My Favourite Writer) But Those Whose Work I Feel Has Been Neglected.

Finally, The Most Grandiose Result Of The Photographic Enterprise Is To Give Us The Sense That We Can Hold The Whole World In Our Heads – As An Anthology Of Images. To Collect Photographs Is To Collect The World

Desire Has No History.

In The Twentieth Century, The Repellent, Harrowing Disease That Is Made The Index Of A Superior Sensitivity, The Vehicle Of "spiritual" Feelings And "critical" Discontent, Is Insanity.

The Becoming Of Man Is The History Of The Exhaustion Of His Possibilities.

Fatal Illness Has Always Been Viewed As A Test Of Moral Character, But In The Nineteenth Century There Is A Great Reluctance To Let Anybody Flunk The Test.

Religion Is Probably, After Sex, The Second Oldest Resource Which Human Beings Have Available To Them For Blowing Their Minds.

In Every Society, The Definitions Of Sanity And Madness Are Arbitrary - Are, In The Largest Sense, Political.

With The Modern Diseases (once Tb, Now Cancer) The Romantic Idea That The Disease Expresses The Character Is Invariably Extended To Assert That The Character Causes The Disease -- Because It Has Not Expressed Itself. Passion Moves Inward, Striking And Blighting The Deepest Cellular Recesses.

All Struggle, All Resistance Is -- Must Be -- Concrete. And All Struggle Has A Global Resonance. If Not Here, Then There. If Not Now, Then Soon. Elsewhere As Well As Here.

I Write Essays First Because I Have A Passionate Relationship To The Subject And Second Because The Subject Is One That People Are Not Talking About.

I Am Profoundly Uncertain How To Write. I Know What I Love And What I Like, Because It's A Direct Passionate Response. But When I Write, I'm Very Uncertain Whether It's Good Enough. That Is, Of Course, The Writer's Agony.

[m]ilitary Metaphors Have More And More Come To Infuse All Aspects Of The Description Of The Medical Situation. Disease Is Seen As An Invasion Of Alien Organisms, To Which The Body Responds By Its Own Military Operations, Such As The Mobilizing Of Immunological "defenses", And Medicine Is "aggressive" As In The Language Of Most Chemotherapies.

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

What Makes Me Feel Strong? Being In Love And Work. I Must Work.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art. Even More. It Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon The World. To Interpret Is To Impoverish, To Deplete The World -- In Order To Set Up A Shadow World Of ''meanings.''

Love Words, Agonize Over Sentences. And Pay Attention To The World.

In Contrast To The Asexual Chasteness Of Official Communist Art , Nazi Art Is Both Prurient And Idealizing. A Utopian Aesthetics (physical Perfection; Identity As A Biological Given) Implies An Ideal Eroticism: Sexuality Converted Into The Magnetism Of Leaders And The Joy Of Followers. The Fascist Ideal Is To Transform Sexual Energy Into A "spiritual" Force, For The Benefit Of The Community.

Etymologically, 'patient' Means Sufferer.

The Problems Of This World Are Only Truly Solved In Two Ways: By Extinction Or Duplication.

A Great Writer Has All 4 - But You Can Still Be A Good Writer With Only 1 And 2.

Ours Is A Society In Which Secrets Of Private Life That, Formerly, You Would Have Given Nearly Anything To Conceal, You Now Clamor To Get On A Television Show To Reveal.

It Is Not Suffering As Such That Is Most Deeply Feared But Suffering That Degrades.

World Suffering

The Discovery Of The Good Taste Of Bad Taste Can Be Very Liberating. The Man Who Insists On High And Serious Pleasures Is Depriving Himself Of Pleasure; He Continually Restricts What He Can Enjoy; In The Constant Exercise Of His Good Taste He Will Eventually Price Himself Out Of The Market, So To Speak. Here Camp Taste Supervenes Upon Good Taste As A Daring And Witty Hedonism. It Makes The Man Of Good Taste Cheerful, Where Before He Ran The Risk Of Being Chronically Frustrated. It Is Good For The Digestion.

Photography Is, First Of All, A Way Of Seeing.

What, I Ask, Drives Me To Disorder? How Can I Diagnose Myself? All I Feel, Most Immediately, Is The Most Anguished Need For Physical Love And Mental Companionship -

Just As A Camera Is A Sublimation Of The Gun, To Photograph Someone Is A Subliminal Murder - A Soft Murder, Appropriate To A Sad, Frightened Time.

Although None Of The Rules For Becoming More Alive Is Valid, It Is Healthy To Keep On Formulating Them.

No 'we' Should Be Taken For Granted When The Subject Is Looking At Other People's Pain.

Decline Of The Letter, The Rise Of The Notebook! One Doesn't Write To Others Any More; One Writes To Oneself.

The Freakish Is No Longer A Private Zone, Difficult Of Access. People Who Are Bizarre, In Sexual Disgrace, Emotionally Violent Areseen Daily On The Newsstands, On Tv, In The Subways. Hobbesian Man Roams The Streets, Quite Visible, With Glitter In His Hair.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

When You Are Writing, You Are - From Society's Point Of View - Only Producing The First Version Which Will Then Be Processed And Recycled.

When Cartier-bresson Goes To China, He Shows That There Are People In China, And That They Are Chinese.

I Perceive Value, I Confer Value, I Create Value, I Even Create — Or Guarantee — Existence. Hence, My Compulsion To Make “lists.” The Things (beethoven’s Music, Movies, Business Firms) Won’t Exist Unless I Signify My Interest In Them By At Least Noting Down Their Names. Nothing Exists Unless I Maintain It (by My Interest, Or My Potential Interest). This Is An Ultimate, Mostly Subliminal Anxiety. Hence, I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

She Felt Herself Needing More And More Sleep. When She Awoke In The Morning, She Thought Of When She Might Lie Down Again - And When She Would Sleep. She Started Going To The Movies.

Total Experiences, Of Which There Are Many Kinds, Tend Again And Again To Be Apprehended Only As Revivals Or Translations Of The Religious Imagination. To Try To Make A Fresh Way Of Talking At The Most Serious, Ardent, And Enthusiastic Level, Heading Off The Religious Encapsulation, Is One Of The Primary Intellectual Tasks Of Future Thought.

Any Sensibility Which Can Be Crammed Into The Mold Of A System, Or Handled With The Rough Tools Of Proof, Is No Longer Sensibility At All. It Has Hardened Into An Idea.

Aids Obliges People To Think Of Sex As Having, Possibly, The Direst Consequences: Suicide. Or Murder.

The "happening" Operates By Creating An Asymmetrical Network Of Surprises, Without Climax Or Consummation, This Is The Alogism Of Dreams Rather Than The Logic Of Most Art.

What I Expect From Writers-and From Myself As A Writer-is To Articulate A Complex View Of Things. To Incite Us To Be More Compassionate. To Orchestrate Our Mourning. And To Celebrate Ecstasy.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Fiction Which Straddles Narrative And Essay.

Images Anesthetize. An Event Known Through Photographs Certainly Becomes More Real Than It Would Have Been If One Had Never Seen The Photographs ... But After Repeated Exposure To Images It Also Becomes Less Real. ... 'concerned' Photography Has Done At Least As Much To Deaden Conscience As To Arouse It.

Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

Each Of Us Carries A Room Within Ourselves, Waiting To Be Furnished And Peopled, And If You Listen Closely, You May Need To Silence Everything In Your Own Room, You Can Hear The Sounds Of That Other Room Inside Your Head.

We Live Under Continual Threat Of Two Equally Fearful, But Seemingly Opposed Destinies: Unremitting Banality And Inconceivable Terror. It Is Fantasy, Served Out In Large Rations By The Popular Arts, Which Allows Most People To Cope With These Twin Specters.

Detachment Is The Prerogative Of An Elite; And As The Dandy Is The Nineteenth Century's Surrogate For The Aristocrat In Matters Ofculture, So Camp Is The Modern Dandyism. Camp Is The Answer To The Problem: How To Be A Dandy In The Age Of Mass Culture.

I Guess I Think I'm Writing For People Who Are Smarter Than I Am, Because Then I'll Be Doing Something That's Worth Their Time. I'd Be Very Afraid To Write From A Position Where I Consciously Thought I Was Smarter Than Most Of My Readers.

Music Is At Once The Most Wonderful, The Most Alive Of All The Arts- It Is The Most Abstract, The Most Perfect, The Most Pure- And The Most Sensual. I Listen With My Body And It Is My Body That Aches In Response To The Passion And Pathos Embodied In This Music.

The Taste For Worst-case Scenarios Reflects The Need To Master Fear Of What Is Felt To Be Uncontrollable. It Also Expresses An Imaginative Complicity With Disaster.

Worst Case Scenario

Pornography Is A Theatre Of Types, Never Of Individuals.

Books Are Not Only The Arbitrary Sum Of Our Dreams, And Our Memory. They Also Give Us The Model Of Self-transcende Nce.

It's Hard Not To Be Afraid. Be Less Afraid.

Funny Graduation

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

The Notion Of Art As The Dearly Purchased Outcome Of An Immense Spiritual Risk, One Whose Cost Goes Up With The Entry And Participation Of Each New Player In The Game.

Fear Binds People Together. And Fear Disperses Them. Courage Inspires Communities: The Courage Of An Example - For Courage Is As Contagious As Fear. But Courage, Certain Kinds Of Courage, Can Also Isolate The Brave.

Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

Nature In America Has Always Been Suspect, On The Defensive, Cannibalized By Progress. In America, Every Specimen Becomes A Relic.

One Doesn't Need To Know The Artist's Private Intentions. The Work Tells All.

The Most Potent Elements In A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

What Seems Distinctively Modern As A Unit Of Thought, Of Art, Of Discourse Is The Fragment; And The Quotation Is One Kind Of Fragment.

If Within The Last Century Art Conceived As An Autonomous Activity Has Come To Be Invested With An Unprecedented Stature - The Nearest Thing To A Sacramental Human Activity Acknowledged By Secular Society - It Is Because One Of The Tasks Art Has Assumed Is Making Forays Into And Taking Up Positions On The Frontiers Of Consciousness (often Very Dangerous To The Artist As A Person) And Reporting Back What's There.

Secular Society

Instead Of Just Recording Reality, Photographs Have Become The Norm For The Way Things Appear To Us, Thereby Changing The Very Idea Of Reality And Of Realism.

Paintings Invariably Sum Up; Photographs Usually Do Not. Photographic Images Are Pieces Of Evidence In An Ongoing Biography Or History. And One Photograph, Unlike One Painting, Implies That There Will Be Others.

What Pornographic Literature Does Is Precisely To Drive A Wedge Between One's Existence As A Sexual Being - While In Ordinary Life A Healthy Person Is One Who Prevents Such A Gap From Opening Up

We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).

The Process Of Building A Self And Its Works Is Always Too Slow. One Is Always In Arrears To Oneself.

On The Level Of Simple Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

You Can Include Essay Elements In Fiction; This Is A Very Nineteenth Century Practice.

There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.

Volume Depends Precisely On The Writer's Having Been Able To Sit In A Room Every Day, Year After Year, Alone.

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Clarice Lispector

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