In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.

The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.

Death is when the monsters get you.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.