Latest Luc Sante Quotes from Interviews

• My method is the magpie's: I look for shiny things. That is, I look for concrete material details of daily life, and I look for vigorous prose, which is the only kind I can read for very long. That effectively bars a great deal of scholarly work, but I didn't feel its loss.

  Luc Sante

  Loss, Long, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places. Parisians crowed about Travail-Famille-Patrie while frequenting brothels. They enjoyed visiting drag shows while clamping down on homosexuality. They celebrated romance while treating women like dirt. Many of these contradictions existed elsewhere, but I do think Paris ruled the hypocrisy championships.

  Luc Sante

  Thinking, Hypocrisy, Romance

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Neoliberalism seems to ramp up every day, making it ever more difficult for anyone but corporations to own and run things and define the flavor of a place. I'd love to be optimistic about the future, but it's not easy.

  Luc Sante

  Running, Optimistic, Easy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class. Gay life is perhaps even more subject to ambiguity, since it so often involves crossing classes.

  Luc Sante

  Gay, Artist, Poor

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I thought of New York as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.

  Luc Sante

  New York, Cities, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Requirements, Emotion, Behavior

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.

  Luc Sante

  Self, Criminals, Essentials

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Call yourself "Colonel" and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you're a solid citizen, the embodiment of hard work and rugged individualism. You're no criminal. The criminal is the guy who comes up short, who gets caught, who fails to adopt a respectable cover.

  Luc Sante

  Hard Work, Guy, Criminals

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Art, Believe, Giving

  Source: www.believermag.com

• My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity.

  Luc Sante

  Mom, New York, Class

  Source: www.believermag.com

• The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker's own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be swindled, and then turn right around and do it again, humans must want to be duped. Institutionalized wishful thinking - the stock market, religion, advertising - is after all a cornerstone of our system.

  Luc Sante

  Thinking, People, Greed

  Source: www.believermag.com

• All I know about 1970s New York City is that it's where I grew up, and you always have an umbilical connection to the time and place of your growing up. It was cheap, didn't have too many people in it, you could go to the movies or whatever on the spur of the moment, you could get by without working too much and especially without involving yourself in the corporate world.

  Luc Sante

  New York, Growing Up, Cities

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Too Much, Detectives, Intrusion

  "Permanent Outsider: Interview with Luc Sante". Art South Africa Interview, artafricamagazine.org. November 25, 2010.

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

  Luc Sante

  Historical, Trying, Social

  "Permanent Outsider: Interview with Luc Sante". Art South Africa Interview, artafricamagazine.org. November 25, 2010.

• 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

  Moving, Fascination, Outsiders

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

  Luc Sante

  America, Culture, Becoming

• 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

  Children, Struggle, Culture

  "Permanent Outsider: Interview with Luc Sante". artafricamagazine.org. November 25, 2010.

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

  Luc Sante

  Wind, Four, Porch

  "Permanent Outsider: Interview with Luc Sante". artafricamagazine.org. November 25, 2010.

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

  Luc Sante

  Memories, Self, Names

  "Permanent Outsider: Interview with Luc Sante". artafricamagazine.org. November 25, 2010.

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