You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

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

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

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

Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.