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

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page