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... 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.

-Susan Sontag

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... Liberal Intellectualstend To

Susan Sontag

...

... 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.

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

The Idea Of Content In Art Is Today Merely A Hindrance, A Nuisance, A Subtle Or Not So Subtle Philistinism.

The Purpose Of Art Is Always, Ultimately, To Give Pleasure - Though Our Sensibilities May Take Time To Catch Up With The Forms Of Pleasure That Art In A Given Time May Offer.

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 Unit Of The Poet Is The Word, The Unit Of The Prose Writer Is The Sentence.

The Likelihood That Your Acts Of Resistance Cannot Stop The Injustice Does Not Exempt You From Acting In What You Sincerely And Reflectively Hold To Be The Best Interests Of Your Community.

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.

I Want To Be Able To Be Alone, To Find It Nourishing - Not Just A Waiting.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.

Cameras Began Duplicating The World At That Moment When The Human Landscape Started To Undergo A Vertiginous Rate Of Change: While An Untold Number Of Forms Of Biological And Social Life Are Being Destroyed In A Brief Span Of Time, A Device Is Available To Record What Is Disappearing.

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.

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.

Photography - The Supreme Form Of Travel, Of Tourism - Is The Principal Modern Means For Enlarging The World. As A Branch Of Art, Photography's Enterprise Of World Enlargement Tends To Specialize In The Subjects Felt To Be Challenging, Transgressive. A Photograph May Be Telling Us: This Too Exists. And That. And That. (and It Is All 'human.') But What Are We To Do With This Knowledge - If Indeed It Is Knowledge, About, Say, The Self, About Abnormality, About Ostracized Or Clandestine Worlds?

All Photographs Aspire To The Condition Of Being Memorable - That Is, Unforgettable.

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

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

Funny Graduation

Writers Are Makers, Not Just Transmitters, Of Myths. Literature Offers Not Only Myths But Counter-myths, Just As Life Offers Counter-experiences - Experiences That Confound What You Thought You Thought, Or Felt, Or Believed.

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

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

Unrequited Love

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

Jews And Homosexuals Are The Outstanding Creative Minorities In Contemporary Urban Culture. Creative, That Is, In The Truest Sense: They Are Creators Of Sensibilities. The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

To Travel Is To Shop.

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.

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.

God, Living Is Enormous!

What Pornography Is Really About, Ultimately, Isn't Sex But Death.

Literature Can Train, And Exercise, Our Ability To Weep For Those Who Are Not Us Or Ours.

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

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

Although There Is A Sense In Which The Camera Does Indeed Capture Reality, Not Just Interpret It, Photographs Are As Much An Interpretation Of The World As Paintings And Drawings Are

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.

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.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

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.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

You Know That You Can't Make References To The Classics Any Longer And Less And Less To The English Classics Even.

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.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

Dissimulation, Secretiveness, Appear A Necessity To The Melancholic. He Has Complex, Often Veiled Relations With Others. These Feelings Of Superiority, Of Inadequacy, Of Baffled Feeling, Of Not Being Able To Get What One Wants, Or Even Name It Properly (or Consistently) To Oneself — These Can Be, It Is Felt They Ought To Be, Masked By Friendliness, Or The Most Scrupulous Manipulation.

Theories That Diseases Are Caused By Mental States And Can Be Cured By Will Power, Are Always An Index Of How Much Is Not Understood About The Physical Terrain Of A Disease.

Part Of The Puzzle, Surely, Lies In The Disconnect Between Official Rhetoric And Lived Realities. Americans Are Constantly Extolling “traditions”; Litanies To Family Values Are At The Center Of Every Politician’s Discourse. And Yet The Culture Of America Is Extremely Corrosive Of Family Life, Indeed Of All Traditions Except Those Redefined As “identities” That Fit In The Larger Patterns Of Distinctiveness, Cooperation, And Openness To Innovation.

There Is A Great Deal That Either Has To Be Given Up Or Be Taken Away From You If You Are Going To Succeed In Writing A Body Of Work.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

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.

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

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

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.

To Paraphrase Several Sages: Nobody Can Think And Hit Someone At The Same Time.

I Can't Say I Know How To Change The Society, But I Share The Feeling That This Society Is Full Of Technology Which Depersonalizes People, Which Seems To Drain A Sense Of Reality From Our Lives. It's Full Of A Lot Of Other Things Too.

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

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.

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

Intelligence Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

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.

The Two Ideas Are Antithetical. Insofar As Photography Is (or Should Be) About The World, The Photographer Counts For Little, But Insofar As It Is The Instrument Of Intrepid, Questioning Subjectivity, The Photographer Is All.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Fact That Illness Is Associated With The Poor --who Are, From The Perspective Of The Privileged, Aliens In One's Midst --reinforces The Association Of Illness With The Foreign With An Exotic, Often Primitive Place.

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.

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.

Desire Has No History.

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.

Salter Is A Writer Who Particularly Rewards Those For Whom Reading Is An Intense Pleasure. He Is Among The Very Few North American Writers All Of Whose Work I Want To Read, Whose As-yet-unpublished Books I Wait For Impatiently.

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

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.

Remember When You Hear Yourself Saying One Day That You Don't Have Time Anymore To Read Or Listen To Music Or Look At Paintings Or Go To The Movies Or Do Whatever Feeds Your Head Now. Then You're Getting Old. That Means They Got You, After All.

The Camera Can Be Lenient; It Is Can Also Expert At Being Cruel. But Its Cruelty Only Produces Another Kind Of Beauty, According To The Surrealist Preferences Which Rule Photographic Taste.

Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

A Photograph Is Both A Pseudo-presence And A Token Of Absence. Like A Wood Fire In A Room, Photographs-especially Those Of People, Of Distant Landscapes And Faraway Cities, Of The Vanished Past-are Incitements To Reverie. The Sense Of The Unattainable That Can Be Evoked By Photographs Feeds Directly Into The Erotic Feelings Of Those For Whom Desirability Is Enhanced By Distance.

Life Is Not Significant Details, Illuminated By A Flash, Fixed Forever. Photographs Are.

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

War Tears, Rends. War Rips Open, Eviscerates. War Scorches. War Dismembers. War Ruins.

Tragedy Is A Vision Of Nihilism, A Heroic Or Ennobling Vision Of Nihilism.

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.

Strictly Speaking, It Is Doubtful That A Photograph Can Help Us Understand Anything.

The Taste For Quotations (and For The Juxtaposition Of Incongruous Quotations) Is A Surrealist Taste.

It's A Pleasure To Share One's Memories. Everything Remembered Is Dear, Endearing, Touching, Precious. At Least The Past Is Safe Though We Didn't Know It At The Time. We Know It Now. Because It's In The Past; Because We Have Survived.

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

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

Communism Is Fascism With A Human Face.

It's Not That You Make Up Your Ideas To Justify Your Temperament But That It's The Temperament First.

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

Illnesses Have Always Been Used As Metaphors To Enliven Charges That A Society Was Corrupt Or Unjust.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

The Life Of The Creative Man Is Lead, Directed And Controlled By Boredom. Avoiding Boredom Is One Of Our Most Important Purposes.

My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

I'm Not Sure At All That Literature Should Be Studied On The University Level. ... Why Should People Study Books? Isn't It Rather Silly To Study Pride And Prejudice. Either You Get It Or You Don't.

The Culture-heroes Of Our Liberal Bourgeois Civilisation Are Ant-liberal And Ant-bourgeois . . .

Never Worry About Being Obsessive. I Like Obsessive People. Obsessive People Make Great Art

Self-exposure Is Commendable In Art Only When It Is Of A Quality And Complexity That Allows Other People To Learn About Themselves From It.

Few Ever See What Is Not Already Inside Their Heads.

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

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

The Basic Unit For Contemporary Art Is Not The Idea, But The Analysis Of And Extension Of Sensations.

One Cannot Use The Life To Interpret The Work. But One Can Use The Work To Interpret The Life.

Guns Have Metamorphosed Into Cameras In This Earnest Comedy, The Ecology Safari, Because Nature Has Ceased To Be What It Always Had Been - What People Needed Protection From. Now Nature Tamed, Endangered, Mortal - Needs To Be Protected From People.

I Belong Rather To A More Classical Tradition Of Social Analysis.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

You Have To Sink Way Down To A Level Of Hopelessness And Desperation To Find The Book That You Can Write.

To Emphasize Style Is To Slight Content, Or To Introduce An Attitude Which Is Neutral With Respect To Content.

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

Whoever Invented Marriage Was An Ingenious Tormentor. It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings. The Whole Point Of Marriage Is Repetition. The Best It Aims For Is The Creation Of Strong, Mutual Dependencies.

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.

In The United States It's Not Important Which Religion You Adhere To, As Long As You Have One.

The Question Of The Social Uses Of Photography Opens Out Into The Very Largest Issues Of The Self, Of The Relationship To Community, To Reality.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

With More People, There Are More Voices To Tune Out.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellectual Upon Art.

The Decline Of Education In North America And I Suppose In Western Europe Makes It Harder To Have A Common Body Of References.

The Possession Of A Camera Can Inspire Something Akin To Lust. And Like All Credible Forms Of Lust, It Cannot Be Satisfied.

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

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.

It's Almost As If This Is The Fundamental Procedure In Modern Society: Duplication And Recycling.

The Young-old Polarization And The Male-female Polarization Are Perhaps The Two Leading Stereotypes That Imprison People.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

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.

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

My Emotional Life: Dialectic Between Craving For Privacy And Need To Submerge Myself In A Passionate Relationship To Another.

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.

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 States Described As Apathy, Moral Or Emotional Anesthesia, Are Full Of Feelings; The Feelings Are Rage And Frustration.

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.

I Feel That I've Had Enough Theoretical Speculation To Last Me A Lifetime.

Transparence Is The Highest, Most Liberating Value In Art - And In Criticism - Today. Transparence Means Experiencing The Luminousness Of The Thing In Itself, Of Things Being What They Are.

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

One Of The Author's Most Ancient Roles Is To Call The Community To Account For Its Hypocrisies And Bad Faith.

We Are Ruled By Quotations.

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.

A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves. The Very Working Of This Economic System, Which Has Bestowed These Unprecedented Liberties, Most Cherished In The Form Of Physical Mobility And Material Prosperity, Depends On Encouraging People To Defy Limits.

There Is An Understandable Vindictiveness In People Who Come From Communist Countries. They Want To Keep Telling Us That We Were Fools To Think That We Could Make Radical Changes In Our Society. Though I Understand Their Dismay, Respect Their Suffering And Don't Understand The Gullibility Of Some People Who Don't Take In How Repressive These Societies Are, I Still Think It's Important To Keep People Of All Kinds As Active In Civic Matters As Possible.

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

Images Have Been Reproached For Being A Way Of Watching Suffering At A Distance, As If There Were Some Other Way Of Watching.

That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.

Using A Camera Appeases The Anxiety Which The Work-driven Feel About Not Working When They Are On Vacation And Supposed To Be Having Fun. They Have Something To Do That Is Like A Friendly Imitation Of Work: They Can Take Pictures.

And What Do I Mean By The Word 'perfection'? That I Shall Not Try To Explain But Only Say, 'perfection Makes Me Laugh.' Not Cynically, I Hasten To Add, 'with Joy.

The Only Interesting Answers Are Those That Destroy The Questions.

I Urge You To Be As Impudent As You Dare. Be Bold, Be Bold, Be Bold.

A Photograph Is Not Only An Image (as A Painting Is An Image), An Interpretation Of The Real; It Is Also A Trace, Something Directly Stenciled Off The Real, Like A Footprint Or A Death Mask.

The Shock Of Photographed Atrocities Wears Off With Repeated Viewings, Just As The Surprise And Bemusement Felt The First Time One Sees A Pornographic Movie Wear Off After One Sees A Few More.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

Time Exists In Order That Everything Doesn’t Happen All At Once…and Space Exists So That It Doesn’t All Happen To You.

Surrealism Can Only Deliver A Reactionary Judgment; Can Make Out Of History Only An Accumulation Of Oddities, A Joke, A Death Trip.

While A Painting, Even One That Meets Photographic Standards Of Resemblance, Is Never More Than The Stating Of An Interpretation, A Photograph Is Never Less Than The Registering Of An Emanation (light Waves Reflected By Objects) — A Material Vestige Of Its Subject In A Way That No Painting Can Be.

I'm Only Interested In People Engaged In A Project Of Self-transformation.

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

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History; It Is The White Race And It Alone — Its Ideologies And Inventions — Which Eradicates Autonomous Civilizations Wherever It Spreads, Which Has Upset The Ecological Balance Of The Planet, Which Now Threatens The Very Existence Of Life Itself.

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

To The Militant, Identity Is Everything.

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.

Time May Enhance What Seems Simply Dogged Or Lacking In Fantasy Now Because We Are Too Close To It, Because It Resembles Too Closely Our Own Everyday Fantasies, The Fantastic Nature Of Which We Don't Perceive. We Are Better Able To Enjoy A Fantasy As A Fantasy When It Is Not Our Own.

A Fiction About Soft Or Easy Deaths Is Part Of The Mythology Of Most Diseases That Are Not Considered Shameful Or Demeaning.

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

The Point Is To Get A Good Rhythm, To Make It Mindless, Almost As A Daydream. To Walk Like Breathing. To Make It What The Body Wants, What The Air Wants, What Time Wants.

The Photographer's Intentions Do Not Determine The Meaning Of A Photograph, Which Will Have Its Own Career, Blown By The Whims And Loyalties Of The Diverse Communities That Have Use For It.

Using Quotations Was At First Quite Spontaneous For Me, But Then This Use Became Strengthened Through Reflection. But Originally This Practice Came Out Of Temperament.

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

To Make Your Life Being A Writer, It's An Auto-slavery ... You Are Both The Slave And The Task-master.

In A Lot Of Writing Or Intellectual Discourse We're Starting To Use That Model: "oh, This Is Where It Comes From!" I Would Like To Concentrate On Work Which Is More Resistant To That Procedure, As I Think Fiction Is.

Along With People Who Pretty Themselves For The Camera, The Unattractive And The Disaffected Have Been Assigned Their Beauty.

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.

Chris Marker Has A Brilliant Mind And Heart And Appetite For Life, And It's A Privilege To Travel With Him To Whatever He Chooses To Remember And To Evoke. He Is One Of Cinema's All Time Greats - The Most Important Reflective Or Non-narrative Filmmaker After Dziga Vertov.

Appetite For Life

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.

Nothing Is Mysterious, No Human Relation. Except Love.

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

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples. The World All In Couples, Each Couple In Its Own Little House, Watching Its Own Little Interests And Stewing In Its Own Little Privacy - It's The Most Repulsive Thing In The World. One's Got To Get Rid Of The Exclusiveness Of Married Love.

Norman Mailer In His Writings Is Ultimately More Concerned With Success Than With Danger; Danger Is Only A Means To Success.

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.

In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.

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.

As One Passion Begins To Fail It Is Necessary To Form Another, For The Whole Art Of Going Through Life Tolerably Is To Keep Oneself Eager About Anything.

[on Marriage:] It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings.

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.

'camp' Is A Vision Of The World In Terms Of Style - But A Particular Style. It Is The Love Of The Exaggerated.

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.

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.

The Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.

All Possibility Of Understanding Is Rooted In The Ability To Say No.

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.

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

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable.

Physical Beauty

The Fear Of Aids Imposes On An Act Whose Ideal Is An Experience Of Pure Presentness (and A Creation Of The Future) A Relation To The Past To Be Ignored At One's Peril. Sex No Longer Withdraws Its Partners, If Only For A Moment, From The Social. It Cannot Be Considered Just A Coupling; It Is A Chain, A Chain Of Transmission, From The Past.

If There Can Be A Better Way For The Real World To Include The One Of Images, It Will Require An Ecology Not Only Of Real Things But Of Images As Well.

His View Of Time, And Of Change, Has Become That Of Most Elderly People: He Hates Change, Since For Him - For His Body - Any Change Is For The Worse. And If There Is To Be Change, Then He Wants It To Happen Quickly, So It Does Not Use Up Too Much Of The Time Remaining To Him.

War Is Elective. It Is Not An Inevitable State Of Affairs. War Is Not The Weather.

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

Most Men Experience Getting Older With Regret, Apprehension. But Most Women Experience It Even More Painfully: With Shame. Aging Is A Man's Destiny, Something That Must Happen Because He Is A Human Being. For A Woman, Aging Is Not Only Her Destiny . . . It Is Also Her Vulnerability.

The Truth Is Balance. However The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

Literature Was The Passport To Enter A Larger Life; That Is, The Zone Of Freedom. Literature Was Freedom. Especially In A Time In Which The Values Of Reading And Inwardness Are So Strenuously Challenged, Literature Is Freedom.

Where Once It Was The Physician Who Waged Bellum Contra Morbum, The War Against Disease, Now It's The Whole Society.

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.

My Idea Of A Writer: Someone Interested In Everything.

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