I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.

There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.