I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
My library is an archive of longings.
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
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.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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.
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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.
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Art is seduction, not rape.
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Passion paralyzes good taste.
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
 they will be indifferent. ){kind=small}
Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
My ignorance is not charming.
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
The really important thing is not to reject anything.
Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
![[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/susan-sontag-51051.jpg)
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
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.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
It is passivity that dulls feeling.
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
 The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. ){kind=small}
The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Most of my reading is rereading.
Desire has no history...
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Try not to live in a linguistic slum.
There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
To the militant, identity is everything.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.
Writing is a mysterious activity.
With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.
War has been the norm and peace the exception
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
To travel is to shop.
Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
It was not a question of knowledge...but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.
Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
