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.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.