Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?