Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

One cat just leads to another.

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.