Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination."
"An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious."
"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."
"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading."
"Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others."
"In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."
"One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness."
"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."
"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."
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."
"I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future."
"The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man."
"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?"
"AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder."
"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."
"It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake."
"Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it."
"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."
"What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death."