The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

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

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.