Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It's a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange