A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.