To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

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

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.