To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.