Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

Art is seduction, not rape.