We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.