Desire has no history...

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

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.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

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.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

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.

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

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.

To the militant, identity is everything.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

War has been the norm and peace the exception

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

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.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

To travel is to shop.

Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

It was not a question of knowledge...but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

You love me. Real or not real?" I tell him, "Real.

You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.

Remember, we're madly in love, so it's all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it.

I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now and live in it forever.

I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.

It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.

Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor.

Well, don't expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.

Destroying things is much easier than making them.