There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

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.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.