The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness – as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure – consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.
Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.
What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
A good book is an education of the heart.
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed – that is the modern view.
The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Literature usually begets literature.
Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That’s how they’re able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted – made cynical, superficial – by this understanding.
The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.
When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.