Luc Sante Quotes

#1. New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.

Luc Sante

#2. I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.

Luc Sante

#3. Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.

Luc Sante

#4. For years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.

Luc Sante

#5. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed

Luc Sante

#6. I try to take pictures on their own terms, considering the historical and social context from which they emerge.

Luc Sante

#7. I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem
to contain it. But I need the stupid things.

Luc Sante

#8. The US remains an object of fascination for me, and the subject of much study, but while many of my friends etc. are American and I have no plans at present to move elsewhere, I consider myself a permanent outsider.

Luc Sante

#9. Like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds.

Luc Sante

#10. Unlike a bow and arrow, a camera by its nature ensures that some kind of target will always be hit, if not necessarily the intended target nor in the intended way.

Luc Sante

#11. Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land

Luc Sante

#12. I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.

Luc Sante

#13. When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.

Luc Sante

#14. I've always assumed it to be an absolute requirement for being a writer: to find all emotions and the sources of all behaviors somewhere within yourself.

Luc Sante

#15. We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.

Luc Sante

#16. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.

Luc Sante

#17. I realised that although I was fascinated with America, its history and culture, I was not interested in becoming
American.

Luc Sante