Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.