Luc Sante Quotes & Sayings

A lot of my favourite American writers are from the 1930s to the 60s. James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling, Meyer Berger: they relied on their intuitions, didn't follow any who-what-where rules of reporting, frequently portrayed a contrary viewpoint. They all over-identified with their subjects. There's never the slightest pretence of objectivity. — Luc Sante

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet. — Luc Sante

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

I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home. — Luc Sante

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

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

Like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds. — Luc Sante

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

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

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

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

New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead. — Luc Sante

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious. — Luc Sante

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

Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds. — Luc Sante

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

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

New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied and unburied, to invade the precincts of supposed progress, to lay chill hands on the heedless present, which does not know how to identify the forces that tug at its rationality. — Luc Sante

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