I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all.
No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it’s a direct passionate response. But when I write, I’m very uncertain whether it’s good enough. That is, of course, the writer’s agony.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both.
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been – what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.