Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.