Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.