Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

I am the dragon, and you call me insane.

It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.' Because he got hurt?' No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.

Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.