 Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. |
| 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. |
| Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. |
| Sanity is a cozy lie. |
| Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. |
| Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. |
| To photograph is to confer importance. |
| 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. |
| In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. |
| The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. |
| Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. |
| A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. |
| Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. |
| Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. |
| It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. |
| Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. |
