The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

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.