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

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

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

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.

A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.