Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

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?