To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.