A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

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.

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.