The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.