To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.