A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.