Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

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