One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

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

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.