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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.