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

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

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

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.