To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.