The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
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.
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.
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 challeng...
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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.
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.
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.
Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
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.
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.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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...
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.