Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

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

It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.