The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

False values begin with the worship of things.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.