As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.