He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.