There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.

La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.

Every sovereign country has the right to control its borders, and should. The idea that anyone would sneak over our borders without proper documentation to me is absolutely abhorrent.

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.