Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Passion paralyzes good taste.