I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

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

He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.