...like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or the mind of Poe on opium.

Don't tell me what's necessary, you presumptupus pup. What's necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might be.

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

Not funny ha ha, funny weird.

If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.

Love and sausage are alike. Can never have enough of either.

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.