To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

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