There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

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

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.