Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.