We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

What was even more germane was my study of the history of religion. It was one of the few things in school I was fascinated by.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.