“whatever doesn’t kill you leaves scars.”

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

My library is an archive of longings.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

How boring just to be a body.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The biggest killer on the planet is stress and I still think the best medicine is and always has been cannabis.

Wanting you is killing me.

You kill your future by mourning the past.

Touch has a memory. O say, love say, What can I do to kill it and be free In my old liberty?

Time perfects all living beings as well as kills them; it alone is awake when all others are asleep. Time is insurmountable.

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favor, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

These thoughts will kill me if I don’t express them.

When I was a small boy, if we had a problem, we would fight about it with our fists. We wouldn’t shoot somebody, killing them or wounding them. That’s not hard to do. I would like people to put down the guns. If you have a problem, talk about it or fight about it.