Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.

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.

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.

Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.

"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."

Cold start is a hard start.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.