Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.