In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

If we all had all we wanted to eat, we'd crap too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

It doesn't matter what answers you get if you ask the wrong questions.

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.