... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.