"If I've bet my life's work on a suspicion that we live at least as much in our wishes and dreams, our constructions and projections, as we do in any real waking life the existence of which we can demonstrate by rapping it with our knuckles, perhaps my non-utilization of the live nude models helped me place the bet. How could I ever be astonished to see how we human animals slid into the vicarious at the faintest invitation, leaving vast flaming puddings of the Real uneaten? I did."

- Jonathan Lethem, "Live Nude Models," in The Ecstasy of Influence, 2011