I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.

Our environments shape the way we see ourselves. If you have been condemned to live in an area that is pretty evidently a rat-run, then sooner or later you're gonna come to the conclusion that you're a rat.

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates.

Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.

Once a man has seen society's black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn't exist.

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing.