However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.