Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not."
"I want to save my soul, that timid wind."
"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."
"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 place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience."
"Desire has no history."
"Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty."
"My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success."
"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."
"Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world"
"When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese."
"You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it."
"The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence."
"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."
"photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing."
"I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love."