Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.

Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.