You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.