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.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

When the time is gone, you can never get it back.

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

By and large... the good's an illusion, little fables folks tell themselves so they can get through their days without screaming too much.

And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.