Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ’intelligence.
I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Writing is a mysterious activity.
If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.