“Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.”

“I am no fan of plane travel. I have always been too skeptical of the physics of the phenomenon to ever be truly comfortable in an airplane.”

“Folding chairs were flying through the air as if propelled by dozens of invisible Bobby Knights.”

“I want to be like air. Invisible, yet everybody needs me in their life.”

“Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed—against reason—that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.”

“Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.”