The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.