He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.