My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture