Athens, Greece - 20071. “A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a secular and sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.”
2. "All forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies."
3. "Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance."
4. "Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."
5. “Books are... funny little portable pieces of thought.”
6. "Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other."
7. "Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future."
8. “False values begin with the worship of things.”
9. “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
10. "If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories."
11. “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 prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
12. "Intelligence. is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas."
13. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
14. "It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe - though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived."
15. “I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.”
16. "Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they
usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is 'sexier' than communism."
17. "Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties."
18. "Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you become a writer."
19. “Sanity is a cozy lie.”
20. "Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
21. "The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood."
22. “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”
23. “The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continuously restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”
24. "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."
25. “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. “
26. "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."
27. "The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication."
28. "The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
29. ”[T]he undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic,' to most people; and when allowed, as an arbitrary decision for temperament, probably unhealthy, too.”
30. “Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were...in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblamatic fragments.”
31. "Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness."
32. "Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."
33. "We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters."
34. "What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up."
35. “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
