The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
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...
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
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.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
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.
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
Writing is a mysterious activity.
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.
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.