People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.