Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

Promise is one thing. Fulfilling that promise is quite another.

We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it.

We have eco-friendly shrimp. We can make them; we have that technology. But we can never have an eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. It doesn't work.

Because the results are unpredictable, no effort of mine is doomed to failure.

All I care about really is writing something worthwhile for children, something that will engage them in some way and stimulates in them a sense of wonder.

Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.

Walking my dogs twice a day provides me with an opening and closing of my day, and I've learned to use those walks for a walking meditation.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.

Things come out of nowhere, and you start evaluating the director, the cast, and all those other things going into it.

Hip-hop has a feeling element, it's not just about knowing music. It's not like classical music or jazz where you can go on raw energy.