Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.