Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.