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 He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.