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.

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.

Malice remains its animating impulse.

Outer beauty you see with your eyes, but inner beauty you only see with your heart.

I lived in London for small amounts of time, and in Florida and New York.

What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?

How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?

Rap is the only interesting music left - it's the only genre that's still pushing itself, and experimenting in a way that I find exciting.

I can't remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.

The first thing I notice is the sky, so full of blue and the kind of brilliant white clouds that make you ecstatic to have eyes. Nothing can go wrong under this sky.

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

People pursue things. As soon as they have them they run away from them.

The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in the future to sing and re-echo upon our canvasses in deafening and triumphant flourishes.