Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Love dies because its birth was an error."
"It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys."
"The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people."
"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."
"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."
"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
"As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible."
"To photograph is to confer importance."
"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"
"I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all"
"Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."
"What we need is to use what we have."
"The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
"The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."
"Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood."
"Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism"
"What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy."
"Shouting has never made me understand anything."
"What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -"