Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

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

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.

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; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.