Top 15 Scott Crary Quotes

(William) Burroughs was all about the future. Was all about liberation through the dismantling of presiding orders. He was a big influence on punk culture and punk music (and me) for that reason.

Making a documentary is like having a dream. You can’t really anticipate what it will be. You have to constantly yield to whatever is manifested before you, to have the courage for whatever is revealed to you. Whatever truth confesses itself, even if it’s not what you anticipated. To just be a mirror. To invite in whatever arrives. To reflect it as loyally.

Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too.

Any art should be advertising for one's soul.

Film photography just makes such an ally of chance, and chance is essential to any valid art, to the poetic…to life, to the spiritual.

Photography is a hunt. But one that ends in the immortality of the prey, rather than the prey’s death.

Don’t hunt for what to photograph. Let images find you. You wander your desert until worthy mirage appears. Wait until that worthy shot comes. And then try to capture it.

Patience is the only honest muse. In writing, in painting, and especially in photography.

Love is never more than a faith, and that’s why it’s so exciting.

Love is at essence ritual of tandem fate, of harmonized experience. It’s a holy thing, that merging of consciousness. Our minds become authored by so many of the same events, colored by so much mutual memory.

(Lydia) Lunch and a lot of the no wave musicians were imbued with the wisdom—and neuroses—of genuine trauma. There's the divine madness in them. When Suicide's Alan Vega sneered, you might have actually found yourself bloodied shortly thereafter. You sure as hell wouldn't reach for your iPhone to Instagram and tag his #antics. You'd feel a little intruded upon, which is precisely how all the best art should make you feel.

There is no artistic worth in compromise, in a pair, in collaboration, in obedient unity. These are all impossible terms. Action must come from the individual. The group (even if just a population of two) is only capable of reaction.

Collective subversion is conformity. The only true revolution is the singular one.

Media technology will place a barrier before us. The barrier of a mirror. It is too loyal to history and the history it preserves will become constantly present. No longer a cultural past merely documented, but a past alive. Eternal. So that it is no longer past, but a continuous present that cycles and repeats endlessly, disallowing the possibility of a future. Static memory. Memory uninterrupted by the present.

Nostalgia is an illness. A symptom of the dying, of those who have more life behind them than before them.