Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.

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

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.