There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.