A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.

I don't think I began to be a professional writer until I learned my weaknesses and what I couldn't do. This forced me to compensate.

People always ask me about the role models that I'm providing for kids, and I say I can't be concerned with that. I'm not worrying about corrupting youth. I'm worrying about writing realistically and truthfully to affect the reader.

A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

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?

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.