A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.