Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears."
"I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me."
"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."
"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel."
"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."
"The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . ."
"Literature usually begets literature."
"In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity."
"Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised."
"Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty."
"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."
"Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable."
"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."
"The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded."
"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."
"Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it."
"One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life."
"Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's."
"We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."