Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.

One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.

That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.