102 quotes
In contrast, images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Wherever people feel safe...they will be indifferent.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
"It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself."
Death Kit (1967)
The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.
AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material.
AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)
Necessary for Diddy the Disciplined to proceed systematically, or he'll get lost. There's a system of priorities here, as anywhere else, that Diddy might be wise to observe.
Death Kit (1967)
To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people.
But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.
Death Kit (1967)
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
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.
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else).
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Too much remembering embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
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.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude — for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents.
According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.
Death Kit (1967)
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)