“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

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.

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

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

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.

The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.

The true disciple should aim to live for the gospel, rather than to die for it.

I tried to write you as a novel but you were only meant to be a chapter.

However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?

That individual who reads useful books is no longer on the same plane of thinking as those who neglected them.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

The unbeliever knows his Koran best.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.