Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.