Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother's.

Two-thirds of what we call New Orleans culture is really myth-making, ... People feed myths of the city back to the city. These myths are now in pieces.

[Many have been speculating on the future of New Orleans. Reading these stories has given me hope that it has one. New Orleans is an] intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked, ... The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music and food. Really great food.

[l Description of poetry:] It's better to let others describe it, ... The language of Saje's poems dares the world to be delightful and I'm delighted to see it rise to the challenge. Guillevic once hoped that poetry would 'do to things what light does to them,' and Saje's poems do just that, waking up the plants, pleating the landscape like an accordion, giving fruits their Zurbaran-like precision in bowls of perfect sunlight.

the city that dreams stories.

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing.