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.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

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

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.