What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.