I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.