He had a thousand-year-old stare.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.

my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.