You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.

Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)