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

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

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.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.