And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

Outside, a gusty October breeze was combing leaves from the trees and sending them across her backyard in colorful skitters.

Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.