What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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.
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
What we need is to use what we have.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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.
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
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.
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
To photograph is to confer importance.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
