All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.