“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”

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 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.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

The more one does the more one can do.

You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.

The time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to.

The ability to change constantly and effectively is made easier by high-level continuity.

My greatest talent is in my ability to choose good friends. It’s about as important as things get.

Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.

As your temptations become greater, so does your ability to make responsible choices.