Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.