One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.