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

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.

Malice remains its animating impulse.

The most beautiful thing about the world is how much is unknown to us. There are so many secrets, Hawthorn. So much awaiting discovery. We are merely dust motes in the vastness of the universe.

There's only one thing a bully respected: bigger bully.

Fear is the parent of cruelty.

Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.

Now Jack Charlton wasn't wrong, I was a bad footballer.

I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.

Where there is humility, there is no story.

The only way to peace is forgiveness.

Reality is blocked by form and image.

My work may feature brown faces but it could be anybody's story.