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

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

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.

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

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.

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.