To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

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

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

Of all the things I wish for her, above all, I want her to know and love the sea.

Violence is the result of hatred & greed conquering the heart of lesser souls.

Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.

National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

The best way of increasing the [average] intelligence of scientists would be to reduce their number.

There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.

The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying.

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.

Stories about vicars are always being told because they're at the heart of our society. Vicars touch all parts of the community and see life in all its extremity.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.