It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

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

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

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