If you scratch a great photograph you find two things: a painting and a photograph.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you

Never tell a man all about yourself, it's bound to lead to trouble.

The richest people are those who have an abundance of what we take with us into the next life.

As a doctor, as a man of science, I can tell you there is no such thing as curses Everything just happens as a question of probability. The statistical likelihood of a specific event.

As I found out making this last movie ["Method"], if you ever do things in an unusual, different way, you got to fight because there's no way people will let you.

True affluence is to not need anything.

Be happy with who you are, where you are, for this is the way.

Our relative being is what rules our relative world.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.