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Portrait of Luc Sante

Luc Sante

Researcher

23 quotes in 218 categories

Luc Sante is a researcher, best known for Low Life: lures and snares of old New York.

Quick Facts About Luc Sante

Profession: Researcher
Notable works: Low Life: lures and snares of old New York

About Luc Sante

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991) and I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (2024).

Biography source: Wikipedia

Quotes by 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…

Cities

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

Four

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Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class.…

Ambiguity

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My method is the magpie's: I look for shiny things. That is, I look for concrete material details of daily life, and…

Concrete

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Neoliberalism seems to ramp up every day, making it ever more difficult for anyone but corporations to own and run things and…

Difficult

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When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming…

Accents

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The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker's own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the…

Advertising

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The US remains an object of fascination for me, and the subject of much study, but while many of my friends etc.…

Education

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

Considering

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I've always assumed it to be an absolute requirement for being a writer: to find all emotions and the sources of all…

Absolutes

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Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly…

Behavior

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I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion…

Chosen

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Call yourself "Colonel" and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you're a…

Caught

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I thought of New York as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and…

Birth

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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.…

Championship

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My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all)…

1930s

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

Inspirational

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

America

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Unlike a bow and arrow, a camera by its nature ensures that some kind of target will always be hit, if not…

Arrows

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I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word…

Art

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New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied…

Acknowledge

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Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its…

Beautiful

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

Contradiction

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