The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

To the militant, identity is everything.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.