169 quotes found
“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.”
“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.”
“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”
“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 o...”
“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 must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.”
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”
“Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.”
“We are told we must choose the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the”
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. Thats what lasts. Thats wha...”
“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.”
“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
“Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not bei...”
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ”
“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie,...”
“The only interesting ideas are heresies”
“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”
“Most of my reading is rereading.”
“Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you dont have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it upup, up. And down we go. I knew that would happen. See, Im on my feet again. See, Im starting to roll it up again...”
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another persons (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, a...”
