Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

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.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease....

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.

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

Twentieth century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Rüyaların yasaklanmamasına hayret ediyorum. Rüya ne büyük bir vaat! Ne büyük zevk! Ne kadar özel! Hem insana bir eş de gerekmez; kadın veya erkek, kimsenin işbirliğine gerek yok. Rüyalar, ruhun tamama ermemiş cinsel eylemidir.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Most of Arbus’s work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn’t have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol’s narcissism...

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has...

Sanity is a cozy lie.

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century...

I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don’t give a damn for anyone’s aggregation of facts,...

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.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art...

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams

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

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

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet...

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

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the...

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

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

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

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

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.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer...

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager....

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or...

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play...

Most of my reading is rereading.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

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

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what...

Hastalıkta hayal gücü her şeydir. Ona gerektiği gibi başvurulduğunda iyileştirir, ama hayal gücü insanı öldürür de. Bedenin hayal gücüyde sıkıcıdır, hatta her şeyi oldukları haliyle kavrar. Rüyalar hayal gücünün şiiri, hastalık ve düzyazısıdır. Hiç durmadan...

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of...

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

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 challenged, literature...

If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness…

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly...

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

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.