Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

To travel is to shop.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.