The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.

There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.