Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

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

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.