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.
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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 t...
Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Writing is a mysterious activity.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
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 wh...
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling traditions; litanies to family values are at the center of every po...