No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

God, living is enormous!

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