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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.

-Susan Sontag

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That Tendency Of Social

Susan Sontag

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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.

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

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

Keeping A Journal

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

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

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

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.

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

Physical Beauty

It Is The Action Of Bodies On Bodies, Not Bodies On Minds, Which The Crowd Enjoys.

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

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

Our Very Sense Of Situation Is Now Articulated By The Camera's Interventions. The Omnipresence Of Cameras Persuasively Suggests That Time Consists Of Interesting Events, Events Worth Photographing. This, In Turn, Makes It Easy To Feel That Any Event, Once Underway, And Whatever Its Moral Character, Should Be Allowed To Complete Itself - So That Something Else Can Be Brought Into The World, The Photograph.

The Danger, When Not Too Dangerous, Fascinate.

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

To Be An Artist Or A Writer Is To Be This Weird Thing - A Hand Worker In An Era Of Mass Production.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Unrequited Love

Lying Is An Elementary Means Of Self-defense.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

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.

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

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

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

Anthropology Has Always Struggled With An Intense, Fascinated Repulsion Towards Its Subject.... [the Anthropologist] Submits Himself To The Exotic To Confirm His Own Inner Alienation As An Urban Intellectual.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Public Voice In The Theater Today Is Crude And Raucous, And, All Too Often, Weak-minded.

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

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

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

... 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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To Travel Is To Shop.

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I Want To Live As Long As Possible, Just To See How Stupid It Gets.

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Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

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.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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

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

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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It Hurts To Love. It's Like Giving Yourself To Be Flayed And Knowing That At Any Moment The Other Person May Just Walk Off With Your Skin.

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.

In Most Modern Instances, Interpretation Amounts To The Philistine Refusal To Leave The Work Of Art Alone. Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous. By Reducing The Work Of Art To Its Content And Then Interpreting That, One Tames The Work Of Art. Interpretation Makes Art Manageable, Conformable.

Camp Is Art That Proposes Itself Seriously, But Cannot Be Taken Altogether Seriously Because It Is 'too Much.

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.

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

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

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

Ideas Disturb The Levelness Of Life

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

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.

To Me, Literature Is A Calling, Even A Kind Of Salvation. It Connects Me With An Enterprise That Is Over 2,000 Years Old. What Do We Have From The Past? Art And Thought. That’s What Lasts. That’s What Continues To Feed People And Give Them An Idea Of Something Better.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

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).

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

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

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Sight Is A Promiscuous Sense. The Avid Gaze Always Wants More.

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

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One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

The Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.

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

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

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

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

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 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.

To Us, The Difference Between The #‎ Photographer As An Individual Eye And The Photographer As An Objective Recorder Seems Fundamental, The Difference Often Regarded, Mistakenly, As Separating Photography As Art From #‎ Photography As Document. But Both Are Logical Extensions Of What Photography Means: Note-taking On, Potentially, Everything In The World, From Every Possible Angle.

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

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.

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.

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

I Don’t Care About Someone Being Intelligent; Any Situation Between People, When They Are Really Human With Each Other, Produces ‘intelligence.

I Love To Read The Way People Love To Watch Television.

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

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.

Victims Suggest Innocence. And Innocence, By The Inexorable Logic That Governs All Relational Terms, Suggests Guilt.

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

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Photographs Shock Insofar As They Show Something Novel.

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

Pornography Is A Theatre Of Types, Never Of Individuals.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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

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

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

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.

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