Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.
The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.
That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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 principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.
Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.