[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….

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biog….

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 ….

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, giv….

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

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, t….

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

Malice remains its animating impulse..

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

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 kin….

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

[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility..

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer,….

[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, th….

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..

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 malevo….

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

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through….

All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointles….