Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

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