By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.