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

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.