Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.
The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.
... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.