Pictures, like words, are what we are made on.

"I am an inquisitive and chaotic traveler. I like discovering places haphazardly, through whatever images they might have to offer: landscapes and buildings, postcards and monuments, museums and galleries that house the iconographic memory of a place. Much as I love reading words, I love reading pictures, and I enjoy finding the stories explicitly or secretly woven into all kinds of works of art – without, however, having to resort to arcane or esoteric vocabularies. … I am guided not by any theory of art but merely by curiosity."

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved. Henry James, Guy de Maupassant

"Pictures, like stories, inform us. Aristotle suggested that every thought process required them. “Now, for the thinking soul, images take the place of direct perceptions; and when the soul asserts or denies that these images are good or bad, it either avoids or pursues them. Hence the soul never thinks without a mental image.” … existence takes place in an unfurling scroll of pictures captured by sight and enhanced or tempered by the other senses, pictures whose meaning (or presumption of meaning) varies constantly, building up a language made of pictures translated into words and words translated into pictures, through which we try to grasp and understand our very existence. The pictures that make up our world are symbols, signs, messages and allegories. Or perhaps they are merely empty presences that we fill with our desire, experience, questioning and regret. Whatever the case might be, pictures, like words, are the stuff we are made on."

From Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel