Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

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

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.