The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.

And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.