“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

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’.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

whatever doesn’t kill you leaves scars.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

It’s just unreal, I’m shocked myself. I’ve played good matches here, but never really almost destroyed somebody.

A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby – take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone.

Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.