Mostly I enjoy the restaurants (my husband is a chef), though I wish we had a wider diversity of ethnic food.

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

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.

The sky is purple, the flare of a match behind a cupped hand is gold; the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mardi Gras are lucky, because the distilled essence of the town burns in their bellies. Chartreuse glows in the dark, and if you drink enough of it, your eyes will turn bright green.

Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.

My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.

If you’re ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.