"All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation."

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

"Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer."

"The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local."

"Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom."

"If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well."

"AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder."

"A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance."

"Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)"

"Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism."

"Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more."

"AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them."

"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."

"To take a 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."

"Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself - these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation."

"The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility."

"Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize."

"What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death."

"In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."

"I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets."

"Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art."

"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs."

"Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

"Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas."

"Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)"

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."

"One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life."

"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel."

"Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others."

"Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings."

"But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else."

"For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied."

"Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals."

"Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us."

"We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing."

"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

"The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more."

"Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

"Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."

"Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility."

"The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present."

"What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed."

"Alone, alone. I am alone " I ache. Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I'm here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT."

"Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them."

"The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."

"It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear endearing touching precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived."

"All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation."

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

"Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance."

"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."