Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

What we need is to use what we have.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.