A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.