The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.