But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror's defeat.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.

Life doesn't happen in chapters - at least, not regular ones.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

A lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say, 'Do not do this' in the hope that it'll work, but if it doesn't, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all.

At least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.