Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.