Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.