The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture

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.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.