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

-Susan Sontag

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Modern Discussions Of The

Susan Sontag

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

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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.

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

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

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

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

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.

The Past Itself, As Historical Change Continues To Accelerate, Has Become The Most Surreal Of Subjects - Making It Possible... To See A New Beauty In What Is Vanishing.

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 Ideology Of Capitalism Makes Us All Into Connoisseurs Of Liberty - Of The Indefinite Expansion Of Possibility.

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.

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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.

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.

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

We Are Told We Must Choose - The Old Or The New. In Fact, We Must Choose Both. What Is A Life If Not A Series Of Negotiations Between The Old And The New?

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

That Sort Of Reception - Where Everything Is Assimilated To The World Of Celebrity - Makes Me Dream Of Becoming A More Recalcitrant, Harder To Assimilate Writer.

What Is The Most Beautiful In Virile Men Is Something Feminine; What Is Most Beautiful In Feminine Women Is Something Masculine.

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

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

The Appetite For Thinking Must Be Regulated, As All Sensible People Know, For It May Stifle One's Life.

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

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.

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 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.

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.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

God, Living Is Enormous!

Is It The Obligation Of Great Art To Be Continually Interesting? I Think Not.

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.

My Idea Of A Writer: Someone Interested In Everything.

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.

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.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images — As, According To Proust, Most Ambitious Of Voluntary Prisoners, One Can't Possess The Present But One Can Possessthe Past.

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.

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

In The Greatest Art, One Is Always Aware Of Things That Cannot Be Said. . .of The Contradiction Between Expression And The Presence Of The Inexpressible. Stylistic Devices Are Also Techniques Of Avoidance. The Most Potent Elements Of A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

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.

Writing Is Finally A Series Of Permissions You Give Yourself To Be Expressive In Certain Ways. To Leap. To Fly. To Fail.

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).

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.

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.

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 Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.

Most Of My Reading Is Rereading.

Cinema Is A Kind Of Pan-art. It Can Use, Incorporate, Engulf Virtually Any Other Art: The Novel, Poetry, Theater, Painting, Sculpture, Dance, Music, Architecture. Unlike Opera, Which Is A (virtually) Frozen Art Form, The Cinema Is And Has Been A Fruitfully Conservative Medium Of Ideas And Styles Of Emotions.

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

My Ignorance Is Not Charming.

Again: There Is Nothing Inherently Superior About Resistance. All Our Claims For The Righteousness Of Resistance Rest On The Rightness Of The Claim That The Resisters Are Acting In The Name Of Justice. And The Justice Of The Cause Does Not Depend On, And Is Not Enhanced By, The Virtue Of Those Who Make The Assertion. It Depends First And Last On The Truth Of A Description Of A State Of Affairs That Is, Truly, Unjust And Unnecessary.

A Good Listener: A Physical Presence That Is Warm, Alert, Intelligent - More Important Than Any Words.

Now The New Things Happening In France Don't Interest Me.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Depression Is Melancholy Minus Its Charms - The Animation, The Fits.

Sanity Is A Cozy Lie.

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.

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

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

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

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

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.

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Few Ever See What Is Not Already Inside Their Heads.

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.

A Lot Of What I've Written In Criticism Of My Lust For Virtue - My Discovery That I've Committed Idolatry, Making Of The Good An Idol - Is Open To The Charge Of Being Still Caught Within The Dialectic Of Idolatry. I've Made A Moral Criticism Of My Moral Consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

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.

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.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

Experiences Aren't Pornographic; Only Images And Representations - Structures Of The Imagination - Are.

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

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.''

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.

One Task Of Literature Is To Formulate Questions And Construct Counterstatements To The Reigning Pieties. And Even When Art Is Not Oppositional, The Arts Gravitate Toward Contrariness. Literature Is Dialogue: Responsiveness. Literature Might Be Described As The History Of Human Responsiveness To What Is Alive And What Is Moribund As Cultures Evolve And Interact With One Another.

[o]ne Person's 'barbarian' Is Another Person's 'just Doing What Everybody Else Is Doing.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

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

The Danger, When Not Too Dangerous, Fascinate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

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

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.

Lying Is An Elementary Means Of Self-defense.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Ideas Disturb The Levelness Of Life

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.

If Literature Has Engaged Me As A Project, First As A Reader, Then As A Writer, It Is As An Extension Of My Sympathies To Other Selves, Other Domains, Other Dreams, Other Territories.

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

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.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In Contrast To The Written Account-which, Depending On Its Complexity Of Thought, Reference, And Vocabulary, Is Pitched At A Larger Or Smaller Readership-a Photograph Has Only One Language And Is Destined Potentially For All.

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.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

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

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

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

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

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.

American Energy. . . Is The Energy Of Violence, Of Free-floating Resentment And Anxiety Unleashed By Chronic Cultural Dislocations Which Must Be, For The Most Part, Ferociously Sublimated. This Energy Has Mainly Been Sublimated Into Crude Materialism

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

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.

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

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

Funny Graduation

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.

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.

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

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.

The Best Emotions To Write Out Of Are Anger And Fear Or Dread. The Least Energizing Emotion To Write Out Of Is Admiration. It Is Very Difficult To Write Out Of Because The Basic Feeling That Goes With Admiration Is A Passive Contemplative Mood.

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

Illness Is The Night-side Of Life, A More Onerous Citizenship. Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick.

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.

Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution. Poignant Longings For Beauty, For An End To Probing Below The Surface, For A Redemption And Celebration Of The Body Of The World. Ultimately, Having An Experience Becomes Identical With Taking A Photograph Of It.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

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.

The Traditional Metaphor For A Spiritual Investigation Is That Of The Voyage Or The Journey. From This Image I Must Dissociate Myself. I Do Not Consider Myself A Voyager, I Have Preferred To Stand Still.

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

... 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.

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

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

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

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.

We Are Ruled By Quotations.

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.

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

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.

If An Irreducible Distinction Between Theatre And Cinema Does Exist, It May Be This: Theatre Is Confined To A Logical Or Continuous Use Of Space. Cinemahas Access To An Alogical Or Discontinuous Use Of Space.

War Is A Culture, Bellicosity Is Addictive, Defeat For A Community That Imagines Itself To Be History's Eternal Victim Can Be As Intoxicating As Victory. How Long Will It Take For The Serbs To Realize That The Milosevic Years Have Been An Unmitigated Disaster For Serbia, The Net Result Of Milosevic's Policies Being The Economic And Cultural Ruin Of The Entire Region, Including Serbia, For Several Generations? Alas, One Thing We Can Be Sure Of, That Will Not Happen Soon.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Etymologically, 'patient' Means Sufferer.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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

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

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

The Only Transformation That Interests Me Is A Total Transformation - However Minute

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

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.

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.

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.

How Boring Just To Be A Body.

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.

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.

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

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

There Is A Terrible, Mean American Resentment Toward A Writer Who Tries To Do Many Things.

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

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

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.

Because Each Photograph Is Only A Fragment, Its Moral And Emotional Weight Depends On Where It Is Inserted. A Photograph Changes According To The Context In Which It Is Seen: Thus Smith's Minamata Photographs Will Seem Different On A Contact Sheet, In A Gallery, In A Political Demonstration, In A Police File, In A Photographic Magazine, In A Book, On A Living-room Wall. Each O These Situations Suggest A Different Use For The Photographs But None Can Secure Their Meaning.

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

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

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

Pornography Is A Theatre Of Types, Never Of Individuals.

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

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

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

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