If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

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.

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.