... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

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

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.