Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.