And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

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

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).

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

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.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.