He did not recognize the person he saw there as himself. He thought that he had spotted a stranger in the mirror (…) .
He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult. He looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He had been one thing before, and now he was another. It was neither better nor worse. It was different, and that was all.
— Paul Auster, City of Glass (The New York Trilogy)
Most people don’t pay attention to such things. They think of words as stones, as great unmoveable objects with no life, as monads that never change. — Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
L’art de l’écrivain consiste surtout à nous faire oublier qu’il emploie des mots. — Henri Bergson
My wanting to take a photograph appears as fast as a bolt and without warning when I spot the subject. I enjoy exploring, looking for things that stop me, or frighten me. To fear to take a picture usually means you want to take it. — Dmitri Kasterine
He will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever. — Paul Auster, Sunset Park
That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed. (…) There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. — Aldous Huxley
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. — Gabriel García Márquez, One hundred years of solitude
The truth is in each character, so the truth is not about a fact but about how characters feel about that fact. — Virginia Woolf
- Pero no hay otra alternativa a la cultura -le dije- que la barbarie.
- Permíteme -objetó él-. La barbarie es lo contrario de la cultura, pero únicamente dentro del sistema de ideas que la cultura nos propone. Fuera de este sistema, es posible que lo contrario sea un cosa muy distinta o simplemente que no haya contrario.
— Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus
When I’m photographing people, I don’t like to give any direction. I react to my subjects in their environment and if it’s going well, I get so immersed in it that I become one with the camera. — Jim Marshall
I’ve found that photography has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them — Elliot Erwitt
Je fus placé à mi-distance de la misère et du soleil. — Albert Camus
[video]
La literatura”, terminó Mario Vargas Llosa, “es mi manera de vivir, como decía Flaubert. No tendré otra, con sus sumas y sus restas, esa es la felicidad de mi vida. La literatura me ha dado lo mejor que tengo; los amigos, las experiencias. La entraña de mi vocación no es otra que la literatura, y de ella sale todo lo que soy y todo lo que tengo. Es lo mejor que me ha pasado”. — Mario Vargas Llosa en el diario El País