The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.