There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

We are all eaters of souls.