Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.