There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

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

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

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