Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

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

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

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.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.