To the militant, identity is everything.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.