I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes, I do, I do. I think. Jerry suddenly understood the poster--the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

The rewriting is always crucial to what I do; whenever I do a scene, I always tell myself that this isn't final and that I can do it again, better. The pacing is probably from experience. I've always liked gradual disclosure. I keep thinking of my rubber-band theory. You have a rubber band that you keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and just at the moment of snapping you release it and start another chapter and start pulling again.