Voyeurism Quotes & Sayings

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Satan's warming me a throne, that's how long [I've been watching you]. Not a chair, not a seat at the bar. The big guy's got a throne with my name on it. — Sarah Winter

Every Artist's Decision; the line between selling, and selling out — Branch Isole

The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people. — Halsey

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too. — Andy Warhol

Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. "You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn't see you very well."
"And not enough time mostly naked in front of my bedroom window?" I teased.
Sam turned bright red. "That," he said, "is so not the point of this conversation. — Maggie Stiefvater

Personally I believe sometimes ugly things happen to good people and sometimes good people do awful things. — Scott Parker

I was highly aware, in writing [the book]ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance. — Emma Donoghue

There's a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography - a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It's found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That's certainly not what we're after in these pages. No, we're after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the ... — Brian D. McLaren

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching. — Sontag, Susan

'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons' is a kind of novel in verse about the arc of an urban lesbian love affair - and I suppose there is a certain amount of voyeurism in the consumption of fiction! The 'Sancerre' poems here are more contemplative and about the relationship of the individual to local and wider histories. — Marilyn Hacker

It was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, — Ann Patchett

I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world. — Kobo Abe

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news. — Kim Edwards

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down. — James Wolcott

Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen. — John Irving

I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect. — Poe Ballantine

All reality TV shows are a triumph of voyeurism. They choose contestants who are ill-suited and slightly freakish. — Terry Wogan

Take down your baby bump photos from Facebook, take down pictures of your kids too. It is your job to protect your children and not parade them around like little circus freaks or glorified mini-you's. — Brandon Kelly

Human beings crave for novelty and welcome even wars. Who opens the morning papers without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing another great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself. Rupert liked order. But there is no man who likes order who does not give houseroom to a man who dreams of disorder. The sudden wrecking of the accustomed scenery, so long as one can be fairly sure of a ringside seat, stimulates the bloodstream. And the instinctive need to feel protected and superior ensures, for most of the catastrophes of mankind, the shedding by those not immediately involved of but the most crocodile of tears. — Iris Murdoch

They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in his notebook. — Virginia Woolf

I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality. — Emma Donoghue

Humans like to look. I think that voyeurism and exploitation are often used in the same sentence. But, in my opinion, voyeurism is a beautiful and delightful thing. There is nothing more intimate than really looking at someone. — Laurel Nakadate

All unknowns, at first, at least, to me, until I, like Columbus, "discovered" them. Is voyeurism a form of imperialism? — Ann Rower

For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you. — Halsey

I suspect, more than voyeurism, that it has something to do with control. Control is a food that Nathan seems to feed on, devouring it with a vulgarity that clashes with his smooth exterior. — Alessandra Torre

Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road. — Olivia Sudjic

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude. — Jean Baudrillard

Prostitution is illegal in many places, but porn is not. But what is porn if not sex for money, caught on camera? What the law actually prohibits then is having paid sex in private and not allowing anyone to watch. — Merlyn Gabriel Miller

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. — Chris Hedges

I think reality TV is so popular because it makes everyone in the country feel like, 'Hey, I can be on TV. I can be a star overnight.' I think America also has a little voyeurism in their hearts. — Shanna Moakler

Photography is a very lonely medium. There's a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that's why I'm a photographer. — Alec Soth

There's certainly something very uncomfortable about the voyeurism involved in being in the press, being an actor, where people have a seemingly insatiable curiosity about, you. — Claire Danes

Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bangladesh that has no effect on us at all? That can be nothing other than voyeurism. — Simon Winchester

I watched you undress. Shame on you! — Ljupka Cvetanova

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions. — Sontag, Susan

Twitter is the marriage of full-tilt narcissism and full-tilt voyeurism that has finally collided in 140 words. — Adam Goldberg

Just don't stare at my ass, Landemere," he added.
"I wasn't staring at your ass," Arranulf, who had been staring at his ass, said. — Andrew Ashling

Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet ... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world. — Allan Sekula

Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives
their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness. — Chaim Potok

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place? — William S. Burroughs

Sexual deviance, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, coprophagy, coprolalia, voyeurism - the list was endless. — Paulo Coelho