"It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices."

"To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize."

"Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading."

"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."

"Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world."

"Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds."

"One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness."

"I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams."

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."

"For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering."

"The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures."

"Writing is a mysterious activity."

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

"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."

"I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it."

"10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction."

"It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones."

"Lying is the most simple form of self-defence."

"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."

"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."

"Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum."

"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."

"In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain."

"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."

"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."

"The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons."

"We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right."

"It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades."

"Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies, it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution."

"To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance."

"To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."

"In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation."

"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."

"Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head."

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."

"One person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing."

"The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication."

"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses."

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

"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing " which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."

"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."

"I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me."

"All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds."

"The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."

"I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting."

"With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven."

"One can never ask anyone to change a feeling."

"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions."