To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

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

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

It is not the position, but the disposition.