“My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness– and the healthiest way of being ill– is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”

All struggle, all resistance is– must be– concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

“Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style– but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated…”

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

“… interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

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

“All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up!” – New York Times Magazine, August 1992