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

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

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.

The best advice that an accomplished writer could give a beginning writer is probably, "Find your slide and then grease it." Almost every writer that wants a rewarding career, in terms of money and status and number of readers, finally finds a certain genre or certain style that he or she sticks with until reaching a critical mass of readership. And I've violated this from the get-go.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.