That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

Whenever I publish a book, I feel like a trapper caught by the Iroquois. They're all lined up with Tomahawks, and the idea is to run through with your head down, and everybody gets to take a swing. They hit you in the head, the back, the ass, and the balls.

Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

I believe in evil, but all my life I've gone back and forth about whether or not there's an outside evil, whether or not there's a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.