A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

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

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

Pain is just another form of information.