When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.