The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

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

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.