My library is an archive of longings.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

We are ruled by quotations.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.