Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.