Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.

South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.