It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.