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

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

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.

The white race is the cancer of human history.