The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.