When there's a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, 'This has always been a quiet neighborhood.' That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn't anyplace that's a quiet neighborhood. People are asking themselves how to stay neat in the cyclone.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.