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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.

-Susan Sontag

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With The Modern Diseases

Susan Sontag

...

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.

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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, Parliamentary Government, Baroque Churches, Newton, The Emancipation Of Women, Kant, Balanchine Ballets, Et Al. Don’t Redeem What This Particular Civilization Has Wrought Upon The World. The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

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

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

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

Art Is Not Only About Something; It Is Something. A Work Of Art Is A Thing In The World, Not Just A Text Or Commentary On The World.

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

... 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.

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

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

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

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

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.

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.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

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

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

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.

It Seems Positively Unnatural To Travel Without Taking A Camera Along... The Very Activity Of Taking Pictures Is Soothing And Assuages General Feelings Of Disorientation That Are Likely To Be Exacerbated By Travel.

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

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

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

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

Unrequited Love

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

When Comedy Fails, Seriousness Begins To Leak Back In.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Desire Has No History.

The Felt Unreliability Of Human Experience Brought About By The Inhuman Acceleration Of Historical Change Has Led Every Sensitive Modern Mind To The Recording Of Some Kind Of Nausea, Of Intellectual Vertigo.

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.

Ours Is An Age Which Consciously Pursues Health, And Yet Only Believes In The Reality Of Sickness.

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.

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

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.

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

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

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

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

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

In A Culture Whose Already Classical Dilemma Is The Hypertrophy Of The Intellect At The Expense Of Energy And Sensual Capability, Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art.

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.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

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

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

The Whole Point Of Camp Is To Dethrone The Serious. Camp Is Playful, Anti-serious. More Precisely, Camp Involves A New, More Complex Relation To "the Serious." One Can Be Serious About The Frivolous, Frivolous About The Serious.

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

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

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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.

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.

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.

Lying Is An Elementary Means Of Self-defense.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Quote Is Always Fascinating Because It Changes Out Of Context, Becomes Different And Sometimes More Mysterious. It Has A Directness And Assertiveness It May Not Have Had In The Original. I Think The Quality Of Inaccessibility, The Mystery, Is Important - That Whatever Matters Can't Be Taken In On Just One Reading Or One Seeing. This Is Certainly A Quality Of The Little Of Art That Lasts.

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

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

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

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.

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

I Have Always Been Full Of Lust - As I Am Now - But I Have Always Been Placing Conceptual Obstacles In My Own Path.

The Moral Pleasure In Art, As Well As The Moral Service That Art Performs, Consists In The Intelligent Gratification Of Consciousness.

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.

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

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

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.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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.

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

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.

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

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.

Quotation Is A Method Of Appropriation Which Is Invincible, I Think. It's Not A Procedure Which Displeases Me, Contrary To Recycling.

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The Writer Is Either A Practicing Recluse Or A Delinquent, Guilt-ridden One--or Both. Usually Both.

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.

Each Generation Has To Reinvent Spirituality.

...what I Write Is Smarter Than I Am. Because I Can Rewrite It.

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

Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous.

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

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

Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos.

I Want To Save My Soul, That Timid Wind.

I Think That There Is Generally Less Of A Community And That The Fragmentation Of The Left Is A Symptom. I Think That It Is Less And Less Possible To Take For Granted Certain Cultural References.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

...to Be A Poet, Requires A Mythology Of The Self. The Self Described Is The Poet Self, To Which The Daily Self (and Others) Are Often Ruthlessly Sacrificed. The Poet Self Is The Real Self, The Other One Is The Carrier; And When The Poet Self Dies, The Person Dies.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

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.

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.

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

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

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

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism -- Victimless Collecting, As It Were... In A World That Is Well On Its Way To Becoming One Vast Quarry, The Collector Becomes Someone Engaged In A Pious Work Of Salvage. The Course Of Modern History Having Already Sapped The Traditions And Shattered The Living Wholes In Which Precious Objects Once Found Their Place, The Collector May Now In Good Conscience Go About Excavating The Choicer, More Emblematic Fragments.

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.

Like The Effects Of Industrial Pollution And The New System Of Global Financial Markets, The Aids Crisis Is Evidence Of A World In Which Nothing Important Is Regional, Local, Limited; In Which Everything That Can Circulate Does, And Every Problem Is, Or Is Destined To Become, Worldwide.

Pornography Is One Of The Branches Of Literature - Science Fiction Is Another - Aiming At Disorientation, At Psychic Dislocation.

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

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.

In The Final Analysis, Style Is Art. And Art Is Nothing More Or Less Than Various Modes Of Stylized, Dehumanized Representation.

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 Ratio Of Authentic Literature To Trash In Pornography May Be Somewhat Lower Than The Ratio Of Novels Of Genuine Literary Meritto The Entire Volume Of Sub-literary Fiction Produced For Mass Taste. But It Is Probably Not Lower Than, For Instance, That Of Another Somewhat Shady Sub-genre With A Few First-rate Books To Its Credit, Science Fiction.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Don't Write Because There's An Audience. I Write Because There Is Literature.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

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.

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

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

Everything Has Changed And Nothing Is Changed.

Things Have Changed

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

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.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples.

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Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

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