The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.