Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

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

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.