[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

My library is an archive of longings.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

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

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.