the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.