When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Don't give me what I ask for, give me what I need.

What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.