My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.