Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.