Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy – it’s the most repulsive thing in the world. One’s got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality – no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.
Opinions are like some kind of crust that grows on top of things and you want to kind of peel them off.
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
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.