But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.