In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.
In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Art is a form of consciousness.
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.
How boring just to be a body.
The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have...
One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ’too much.