The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

Photographers are always imposing

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.