I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water. |
I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a 'will to renewal'. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of 'crises', of rupture, re |
I've always been suspicious of collective truths. |
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. |
Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars. |
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. |
Living is abnormal. |
Marx was wrong; jealousy and pride, emotional forces, are just as responsible as hunger and necessity for our actions; they explain the whole of History, and the initial fall of man. |
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. |
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth |
Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination. |
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair. |
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish. |
The critic should describe, and not prescribe. |
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly awar |