Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.

True love always happens in a flash.

Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon making them look as if they had fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs.

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.

Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.