Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

Basically, we are pack animals. We may be evolving toward hive animals. The nature of the pack is that if all the eyes of the pack are on you, you are either the leader, or you are lunch. So it's a basically hazardous situation to have the eyes of the pack upon you. And I think that's really visceral. I think that's bred in the bone. That's species - deep.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.