I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

If you get old fashioned enough, you'll always be in style.

Have you ever had a broken heart?

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.