The Detonator: The Best of BOMB Magazine

Music is visceral. The written page is mental. You take in the vibrations—they go into your eye and into your brain. But with music, it fills the atmosphere, it penetrates your body.

—Sam Coones, BOMB 2012

I think that one of the reasons why I wanted to be a director is because I felt that I was not a very communicative or articulate person. Nor a very organized person. And I think that directing forces you to be communicative, to use language clearly, to be organized, to be responsible, to be good to people. Not merely to get what you want because you are both, you and the actor, you and the designer, you and whoever else, you’re doing something together and you’re working for the piece, whatever it is. It’s just a profound opportunity. Directing is a profound opportunity to learn how to do that, to somehow function in a community.

—JoAnne Akalaitis, BOMB 5, 1983

Art making is like being badly sunburned: you’re peeling, you’re trying to get the layers of the world off you to get to yourself.

—Michael Goldberg, BOMB 75, 2001 

America has always had a plethora of perfect writers. Great writers there is always a shortage of; great writers can have their faults.

—Edward Roditi, BOMB 8, 1983, art by Horace Walpole

You could pull almost any image in the library out of its context and it would probably be nearly impossible to identify its source or its meaning. In other words, the bizarre quality of the images might not necessarily be a function of the texts that they live in.

—Andrew Beccone, the man behind the Reanimation Library, in BOMB, 2012

Music’s not only physical, there’s something else in it too that seems to be attached to the physical, but separate from the physical, which is, I don’t know, soul. That’s similar to the human body. You’ve got something that seems to be attached to your body in some way and yet is not your body.

—Sam Coones, BOMB 2012

Cinema is the art of reality, the medium in which reality’s beauty is captured, where you can film marble or a face, or record someone’s voice, a sunset, the innate beauty of what you’re contemplating.

—Carlos Reygadas, BOMB 111, 2010

For me, artists are—before everything else—citizens, which means that we are embedded in a social fabric with specific histories. So, to fully understand what an artist does, one needs to understand the social, economical, and cultural forces that shape their subjectivity.

—Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, BOMB 2011

I like to think of moving through the sentence (as writer or reader) as moving through a kind of terrain. The sentence is at once a map of where we have gone and where we wish to go.

—Renee Gladman, BOMB 2011