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

“Let the atrocious images haunt us. … This is what human beings are capable of doing– may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.” – Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.” – Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Being photographed… I feel transfixed, trapped… I become the looked-at… For as much as I am a professional seer, I am a hopelessly amateur see-ee. An eternal photographic virgin. I feel the same perplexity each time I’m photographed.” – “Certain Mapplethorpes,” from Where the Stress Falls, 2001

“We want to leave the language in perhaps slightly better shape because of our passage through it, in all our books, rather than in worse shape.” -Interview with Nadine Gordimer 1984

We want to leave the language in perhaps slightly better shape because of our passage through it, in all our books, rather than in worse shape. -Interview with Nadine Gordimer 1984