There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

I'm a very friendly socialist.

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair.