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

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.

The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.

I’m convinced that promoting sport is an intelligent way of educating our children.

People’s lives really do turn out differently. And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class.

This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.

The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.

Which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don’t sit around and call each other names. That’s what you can find on a third grade playground.