QuoteLog

“It’s a very weird situation because I keep asking myself how I suddenly was thrust into the position of being travel agent for death. You know, spokesperson for the doomed. But then of course the whole point of why it’s so strange is that I had already assigned myself that role so many years of writing ago.”

“If you watch some of the battle scenes in the new ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie involving hordes of warriors fighting each other with swords, flails and crossbows, you realize it’s no different than the beer line at a Raider game.”

“I don’t know about you, but to me there’s just something about tuba players gyrating their tubas to ‘Black Magic Woman’ that really shouts ‘Super Bowl.’”

“Book burners are neither Nazis, nor Communists, nor religious nuts. They’re just people who have moved one too many times.”

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

“One man’s folly is another man’s wife.”

“Americans have different ways of saying things. They say ‘elevator’, we say ‘lift’ ... they say ‘President’, we say ‘stupid psychopathic git.’ ”

“It’s all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image. The most interesting fact to contemplate is that someone had the will and the opportunity to take it at all. You’re looking at the specific and fleeting relationship among those three things — artist, camera, world.”