Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

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

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

To the militant, identity is everything.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.