There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner.

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.

Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.