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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.

-Susan Sontag

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Literature Was The Passport

Susan Sontag

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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.

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To Patronize The Faculty Of Taste Is To Patronize Oneself. For Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response.

Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

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

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.

I Think Part Of The Success Which Structuralist Or Post-structuralist Thought In Critical Theory Has Had In Literary Studies In American Universities Is Due To A Theoretical Vacuum.

American Universities

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

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.

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.

The Way In Which A Certain Kind Of Political Idealism Has Been Discredited And Scorned Makes The Danger Not That Intellectuals Keep On Making Fools Of Themselves, Formulating Political Opinions When They Might Not Be As Informed As They Might Be, But That They Retreat And Leave Politics To The Professionals.

Political Opinions

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.

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.

There Are Some Elements In Life - Above All, Sexual Pleasure - About Which It Isn't Necessary To Have A Position.

Read A Lot. Expect Something Big, Something Exalting Or Deepening From A Book. No Book Is Worth Reading That Isn't Worth Re-reading.

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

Ours Is A Culture Based On Excess, On Overproduction; The Result Is A Steady Loss Of Sharpness In Our Sensory Experience. All The Conditions Of Modern Life - Its Material Plenitude, Its Sheer Crowdedness - Conjoin To Dull Our Sensory Faculties

Any Photograph Has Multiple Meanings: Indeed, To See Something In The Form Of A Photograph Is To Encounter A Potential Object Of Fascination. The Ultimate Wisdom Of The Photographic Image Is To Say: “there Is The Surface. Now Think – Or Rather Feel, Intuit – What Is Beyond It, What The Reality Must Be Like If It Looks This Way.’ Photographs, Which Cannot Themselves Explain Anything, Are Inexhaustible Invitations To Deduction, Speculation, And Fantasy

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.

Our Appreciations, It Was Felt, Could Be So Much More Inclusive If We Said That Something, Instead Of Being Beautiful, Was 'interesting'.

I Discovered That I Am Tired Of Being A Person. Not Just Tired Of Being The Person I Was, But Any Person At All

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

All Understanding Begins With Our Not Accepting The World As It Appears.

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 Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

But I Cannot Forgive Those Who Did Not Care About More Than Their Own Glory Or Well-being. They Thought They Were Civilized. They Were Despicable. Damn Them All.

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

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

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

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.

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

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.

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

There Are More And More Taboos About Calling Something, Anything, Ugly.

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

To Suffer Is One Thing; Another Thing Is Living With The Photographed Images Of Suffering, Which Does Not Necessarily Strengthen Conscience And The Ability To Be Compassionate. It Can Also Corrupt Them. Once One Has Seen Such Images, One Has Started Down The Road Of Seeing More - And More. Images Transfix. Images Anesthetize.

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

Superficial To Understand The Journal As Just A Receptable For One's Private, Secret Thoughts - Like A Confidante Who Is Deaf, Dumb, And Illiterate. In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself. ... The Journal Is A Vehicle For My Sense Of Selfhood. It Represents Me As Emotionally And Spiritually Independent. Therefore (alas) It Does Not Simply Record My Actual, Daily Life But Rather - In Many Cases - Offers An Alternative To It.

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

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead.

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.

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

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

... 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

That Even An Apocalypse Can Be Made To Seem Part Of The Ordinary Horizon Of Expectation Constitutes An Unparalleled Violence That Is Being Done To Our Sense Of Reality, To Our Humanity.

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.

Our Task Is Not To Find The Maximum Amount Of Content In A Work Of Art, Mush Less To Squeeze More Content Out Of The Work Than Is Already There. Our Task Is To Cut Back On Content So We Can See The Thing At All. 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.

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.

In America, The Photographer Is Not Simply The Person Who Records The Past, But The One Who Invents It.

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

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

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

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.

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.

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

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That Tendency Of Social Thought To Generalize, To Describe A Leading Tendency In A Society In Such A Way That It Seems That Everything Falls Within Its Iron Laws, Is Very Common. Of Course Our Own Experience Tells Us That Life Is Not As Monochrome As These Thinkers Depict It. On The Other Hand They Are Very Valuable Because They Alert Us To Transformations We Are Likely To Take For Granted.

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

Funny Graduation

God, Living Is Enormous!

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

Tamed As It May Be, Sexuality Remains One Of The Demonic Forces In Human Consciousness - Pushing Us At Intervals Close To Taboo And Dangerous Desires, Which Range From The Impulse To Commit Sudden Arbitrary Violence Upon Another Person To The Voluptuous Yearning For The Extinction Of One's Consciousness, For Death Itself. Even On The Level Of Simple Physical Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles Having An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

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

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

By Furnishing This Already Crowded World With A Duplicate One Of Images, Photography Makes Us Feel That The World Is More Available Than It Really Is.

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.

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

Photographs Objectify: They Turn An Event Or A Person Into Something That Can Be Possessed.

It Is The Nature Of Aphoristic Thinking To Be Always In A State Of Concluding; A Bid To Have The Final Word Is Inherent In All Powerful Phrase-making.

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

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Photographs Furnish Evidence. Something We Hear About, But Doubt, Seems Proven When We're Shown A Photograph Of It.

Creativity Needs To Be Taken Care Of. It's Like A Big Baby That Needs To Be Nourished.

This Is The Beauty That Emerges From Self-confidence, Class Confidence. That Says, I Am Not Born To Please. I Am Born To Be Pleased.

Self Confidence

Result Of Self-consciousness: Audience And Actor Are The Same. I Live My Life As A Spectacle For Myself, For My Own Edification. I Live My Life But I Don't Live In It. The Hoarding Instinct In Human Relations.

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

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.

Being In Love Means Being Willing To Ruin Yourself For The Other Person.

An Important Job Of The Critic Is To Savage What Is Mediocre Or Meretricious.

As Industrialization Provided Social Uses For The Operations Of The Photographer, So The Reaction Against These Uses Reinforced The Self-consciousness Of Photography-as-art.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

The Hard Truth Is That What May Be Acceptable In Elite Culture May Not Be Acceptable In Mass Culture, That Tastes Which Pose Only Innocent Ethical Issues As The Property Of A Minority Become Corrupting When They Become More Established. Taste Is Context, And The Context Has Changed.

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

Self-respect. It Would Make Me Lovable. And It's The Secret To Good Sex.

Fewer And Fewer Americans Possess Objects That Have A Patina, Old Furniture, Grandparents Pots And Pans - The Used Things, Warm With Generations Of Human Touch, Essential To A Human Landscape. Instead, We Have Our Paper Phantoms, Transistorized Landscapes. A Featherweight Portable Museum.

I Have To Come Out Of The Closet Of The Third Person And Speak In A More Direct Way.

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

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Cancer Is A Demonic Pregnancy.

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

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

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

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

When You See Your 40-page Essay Turned Into A "hot Tip" In One Paragraph In Newsweek, You Get Anxious About The Way Your Writing Has Been Used.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. That Means Trying To Understand, Take In, Connect With, What Wickedness Human Beings Are Capable Of; And Not Be Corrupted - Made Cynical, Superficial - By This Understanding.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

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.

Someone Who Is Perennially Surprised That Depravity Exists, Who Continues To Feel Disillusioned (even Incredulous) When Confronted With Evidence Of What Humans Are Capable Of Inflicting In The Way Of Gruesome, Hands-on Cruelties Upon Other Humans, Has Not Reached Moral Or Psychological Adulthood.

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.

The Destiny Of Photography Has Taken It Far Beyond The Role To Which It Was Originally Thought To Be Limited: To Give More Accurate Reports On Reality (including Works Of Art). Photography Is The Reality; The Real Object Is Often Experienced As A Letdown.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World.

To Photograph People Is To Violate Them, By Seeing Them As They Never See Themselves, By Having Knowledge Of Them That They Can Never Have; It Turns People Into Objects That Can Be Symbolically Possessed. 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.

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

One Criticizes In Others What One Recognizes And Despises In Oneself. For Example, An Artist Who Is Revolted By Another’s Ambitiousness.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

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.

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

Norman Mailer Records In His Recent Essays And Public Appearances His Perfecting Of Himself As A Virile Instrument Of Letters; He Is Perpetually In Training, Getting Ready To Launch Himself From His Own Missile Pad Into A High, Beautiful Orbit; Even His Failures May Yet Be Turned To Successes.

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.

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.

The Only Story That Seems Worth Writing Is A Cry, A Shot, A Scream. A Story Should Break The Reader's Heart.

The Only Interesting Answers Are Those That Destroy The Questions.

Ambition, If It Feeds At All, Does So On The Ambition Of Others.

[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.

The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

Between Two Fantasy Alternatives, That Holbein The Younger Had Lived Long Enough To Have Painted Shakespeare Or That A Prototype Of The Camera Had Been Invented Early Enough To Have Photographed Him, Most Bardolators Would Choose The Photograph. This Is Not Just Because It Would Presumably Show What Shakespeare Really Looked Like, For Even If The Photograph Were Faded, Barely Legible, A Brownish Shadow, We Would Probably Still Prefer It To Another Glorious Holbein. Having A Photograph Of Shakespeare Would Be Like Having A Nail From The True Cross.

Communism Is Fascism With A Human Face.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers.

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

Intelligence Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing, Something To Value Or Cultivate. It's More Like A Fifth Wheel - Necessary Or Desirable When Things Break Down. When Things Go Well, It's Better To Be Stupid ... Stupidity Is As Much A Value As Intelligence.

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

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

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

Physical Beauty

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.

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.

People Tend To Become Cynical About Even The Most Appalling Crisis If It Seems To Be Dragging On, Failing To Come To Term.

What We Need Is To Use What We Have.

Use It Or Lose It

Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

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.

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

Persons Who Merely Have-a-life Customarily Move In A Dense Fluid. That's How They're Able To Conduct Their Lives At All. Their Living Depends On Not Seeing.

You Can Go Into All Sorts Of Situations With A Camera And People Will Think They Should Serve It.

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.

Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

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.

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

The Solution To A Problem - A Story That You Are Unable To Finish - Is The Problem. It Isn't As If The Problem Is One Thing And The Solution Something Else. The Problem, Properly Understood = The Solution. Instead Of Trying To Hide Or Efface What Limits The Story, Capitalize On That Very Limitation. State It, Rail Against It.

Loeb Has Been Doing Wonderfully Patient Work, Exploring The American Conscience From The Inside. I Regard Him As Something Of A National Treasure.

Taste Tends To Develop Very Unevenly. It's Rare That The Same Person Has Good Visual Taste And Good Taste In People And Taste In Ideas.

I Was Not Looking For My Dreams To Interpret My Life, But Rather For My Life To Interpret My Dreams.

Follow Your Dreams

Although Photography Generates Works That Can Be Called Art-it Requires Subjectivity, It Can Lie, It Gives Aesthetic Pleasure-photography Is Not, To Begin With, An Art Form At All. Like Language, It Is A Medium In Which Works Of Art (among Other Things) Are Made.

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.

The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Attractiveness - As Well As The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Pleasure - Consists In Going Against The Grain Of One's Sex.

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.

Any Important Disease Whose Causality Is Murky, And For Which Treatment Is Ineffectual, Tends To Be Awash In Significance.

The Need For Truth Is Not Constant; No More Than Is The Need For Repose. An Idea Which Is A Distortion May Have A Greater Intellectual Thrust Than The Truth; It May Better Serve The Needs Of The Spirit, Which Vary. The Truth Is Balance, But The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

It's So Effortless To Let My Loneliness Defeat Me, Make Me Mold Myself To Whatever Would (in Some Way - But Not Wholly) Relieve It. I Must Never Forget It... I Want Sensuality And Sensitivity, Both... Let Me Never Deny That... I Want To Err On The Side Of Violence And Excess, Rather Than To Underfill My Moments.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

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.

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.

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.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

One Can Know Worlds One Has Not Experienced, Choose A Response To Life That Has Never Been Offered, Create An Inwardness Utterly Strong And Fruitful.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

The Fantasies Inspired By Tb In The Last Century, By Cancer Now, Are Responses To A Disease Thought To Be Intractable And Capricious--that Is, A Disease Not Understood--in An Era In Which Medicine's Central Premise Is That All Diseases Can Be Cured.

A Photograph Passes For Incontrovertible Proof That A Given Thing Happened. The Picture May Distort; But There Is Always A Presumption That Something Exists, Or Did Exist, Which Is Like What’s In The Picture

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead. Pay Attention. It's All About Paying Attention. Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

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.

The Only Ideals Allowed Are Healthy Ones - Those Everyone May Aspire To, Or Comfortably Imagine Oneself Possessing.

Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick. Although We All Prefer To Use Only The Good Passport, Sooner Or Later Each Of Us Is Obliged, At Least For A Spell, To Identify Ourselves As Citizens Of That Other Place.

The Quality Of American Life Is An Insult To The Possibilities Of Human Growth... The Pollution Of American Space, With Gadgetry And Cars And Tv And Box Architecture, Brutalizes The Senses, Making Gray Neurotics Of Most Of Us, And Perverse Spiritual Athletes And Strident Self-transcenders Of The Best Of Us.

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

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

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

I Haven't Been Everywhere, But It's On My List.

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.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

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

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.

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

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

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

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.

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.

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.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Can I Love Someone...and Still Think/fly? Love Is Flying, Sown, Floating. Thought Is Solitary Flight, Beating Wings.

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