It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

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