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 He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

A good book is an education of the heart.

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.