What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

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.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

Passion paralyzes good taste.