“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

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.

Photographers are always imposing.

I like people who can make you laugh without using vulgarity, or bad words.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Congress must not leave for the Christmas holiday until we protect working people.

Government is the people’s business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.

When people show you who they are – believe them!

The old country singers, they were badass, they were the American badass people. I’m an American badass. At 40 years old, I’m gonna be a country singer.