There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.

I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.

We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.