A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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.
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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.
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.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
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.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
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.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
To photograph is to confer importance.
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.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
What we need is to use what we have.
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