Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

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.