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.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

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.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.