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.

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.

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.

Malice remains its animating impulse.

It is known that the best nations have always been those which concede the greatest amount of liberty to women.

What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

I've never managed anywhere, I've managed to stay alive for 63 and a half years baby.

I think there's some stuff that's at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about.

Nothing rectifies out-of-control market failures like a healthy dose of government intervention and mountains of bureaucracy.

Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.

Happy he who like Ulysses has made a great journey.

Progress is a choice. Job creation is a choice. Whether we give our children a future of more or a future of less - this, too, is a choice.

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.