My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity.

The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker's own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be swindled, and then turn right around and do it again, humans must want to be duped. Institutionalized wishful thinking - the stock market, religion, advertising - is after all a cornerstone of our system.

Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed

New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.

I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.

I've always assumed it to be an absolute requirement for being a writer: to find all emotions and the sources of all behaviors somewhere within yourself.

Like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds.