The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
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...
For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his...
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the phot...
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
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.
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
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.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
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.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challeng...
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.