War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.