Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.