Pornography is one of the branches of literature – science fiction is another – aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not ’language.
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary – are, in the largest sense, political.
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent – more important than any words.
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable – that is, unforgettable.
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.
If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism.
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
There are some elements in life – above all, sexual pleasure – about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.
I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
One of the author’s most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith...