To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

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

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.