The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
That’s the source of the meditation on death I’ve carried in my heart all my life.
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”, Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one–or both. Usually both.
If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
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.
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
It is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance.
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind – like most historical evidence.
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain.
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize.
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more.
Often something looks, or is felt to look, “better” in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn’t worth re-reading.
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.
[O]ne person’s ‘barbarian’ is another person’s ‘just doing what everybody else is doing.
With genius, as with beauty — all, well almost all, is forgiven.
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the
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.
Can I love someone…and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.
For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.
There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness…
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
All struggle, all resistance is — must be — concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
Twentieth century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.
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.
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality and eventually in one’s own.
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear endearing touching precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past because we have survived.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past present and future.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
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.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.