I'm more cautious about what I write.

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

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

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.