Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.