The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remainds perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in and then immediately clouds.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968 I started to think write and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

I photographed rocks and trees and tide pools and nudes and all that stuff for years and years. Until 20 years ago when I found that I could do it in the studio and never have to travel.

Until 1914 I loved to travel I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

I wrote those poems for myself as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

If you're climbing the ladder of life you go rung by rung one step at a time. Don't look too far up set your goals high but take one step at a time. Sometimes you don't think you're progressing until you step back and see how high you've really gone.

It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.