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

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.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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

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

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