The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.
Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
The happiness of being envied is glamour.
This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.
A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at.
The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.
Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live.
The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born.
The canvas is on the easel now, as large and white as a sheet that has never been slept in. My paintings have become larger and larger as I have grown older. As a young painter you are overwhelmed by the complexity of your subject. Every crease, every dimple, is an equally startling revelation. It’s like your first girl. You don’t understand her. You can only copy her – hesitantly. Later you become shamelessly yourself. You create in your image – as nearly life-size as possible.
Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched.
Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.
A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.
To become bored with eating is to be bored with life.
Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich,’ Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with succinct clarity. Although.
All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.