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

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

False values begin with the worship of things.

My ignorance is not charming.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.