I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

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

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!