The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.
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.
Desire has no history...
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
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.
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
I write – and talk – in order to find out what I think.
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.