If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning

Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.

Fear never shows up and the party ends early.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.