Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.