Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.

where the world ends is where you must begin

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.