All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri

You have to live to really know things, my love

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.