The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.