No, if there's any ultimate redemption, it would be because I passed though your life without scarring you, and did not diminish who you are.

Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.

I can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.

There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith.

A silent dark...as black as a moonless lake, as a ravine's wings, darkness there and nothing more, merely this and nothing more.