The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’ the least talented talk about Art the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

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

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don't get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.

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.

The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.

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

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.

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

All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths each is absurd each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.

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.

Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.