The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.