The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.