“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. ”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.”

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ”

“To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives. ”