It's very painful to be in debt. I'm the kind of person who would rather almost die than go into debt.

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.

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.

Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

I have a particular dislike of human pride. And if you think that you can engineer outcomes, that's a manifestation of pride. Among other things, it's impractical. It just doesn't work. The world doesn't work that way.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.