Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

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.

No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses.

Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.

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