Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.