Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.