I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

[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.