When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.