The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

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