The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.

And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.

It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.