The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.