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.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

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