Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.