Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.