When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Once in a while, Jimmy would make up a word but he never once got caught out. ... He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him; all they proved was that no one was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.