Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

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

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.