“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”

“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn’t worth re-reading.”

“[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement — not incitement.”

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

“‘Plague’ is the principal metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood. And because of AIDS, the popular misidentification of cancer as an epidemic, even a plague, seems to be receding: AIDS has banalized cancer.” “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it fro these meanings, these metaphors,…

“Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a let-down.”

“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.”