perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.