All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

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