I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.