Good Travel Books Are Novels At Heart.

In The City One Clings To Nostalgic And Unreal Signs Of Community, Takes Forced Refuge In Codes, Badges And Coteries; The City's Life, Of Surfaces And Locomotion, Usually Seems Too Dangerous And Demanding To Live Through With Any Confidence.

Sociology And Anthropology Are Not Disciplines Which Take Easily To Situations Where People Are Able To Live Out Their Fantasies, Not Just In The Symbolic Action Of Ritual, But In The Concrete Theater Of Society At Large.

When I Want An Opinion, I'll Get It From My Peers - From Men Of Vision, Like Our Great Railroad Builders... Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore... Fellows With Imaginations Broad Enough To Span The Continent.

The Mythical America?that Marvellous, Heroic, Sentimental Landwas An Object Of Faith. It Challenged You To Make The Believer's Leap Over The Rude Facts At Your Feet.

Insofar As I Think About Postmodernism At All, And It Doesn't Exactly Keep Me Awake At Nights, I Think Of It As Something That Happens To One, Not A Style One Affects. We're Postmoderns Because We're Not Modernists. The Modernist Writers—pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke With A Kind Of Vatic Authority: They Were Really The Last Of The Romantics, For Whom Authorship Itself Was Like Being A Solitary Prophet In The Wasteland.