American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship