There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

I simply think that there are things in this world that are relics. We have unsettling remnants of Atlantis. They have found things off Bermuda, great walls and things of that sort. This seems to indicate that there were races and cultures that went before us. And to me, that's an unsettling idea.

Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.

Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.