I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.

All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person’s body at your thrall.

My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.