I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.