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

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.