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Photography... "It could be a great art but it is dangerous. We can become obsessed with images" - images that supersede the events they record. "It is a typical danger of our civilization. Even on television, we are bombarded with images. A man holds a man - followed by a commercial for a desert. An earthquake is followed by Bob Hope."

Lina Wertmuller NY Times Jan 27.1978 pC11.

I think one has a choice with imagery, either to enlarge or to diminish. At this point I find diminishment despicable. When I was a younger man I thought it brilliant. But as a mature novelist I think one's responsibility is to perhaps get a few more details in and come out with a somewhat larger character. Chekov, in his journals, urges the writer to know as much as he possibly can about a character - his shoe

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size, his liver condition, any tendency he might have to lordosis, his lungs, clothes, habits, intestinal tract - and then, from this glossary, to pick one detail. It is a judgement of character by a single attribute.

John Cheever p32 NY Time Book Review 3.26.78

I think I have a clarity of vision. To begin with I couldn't attain it... then I got to the point where this clarity could be achieved. I could do it... this clearness which I love and which moves me. But I don't paint detail for detail's sake. What moves me is a clarity of surface - and making the parts equal the whole. It's the parts that add up to the clarity.

Catherine Murphy in Art News Dec 78 p57

Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.