The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

God, living is enormous!

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

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

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures