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.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

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.

Art is seduction, not rape.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.