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

And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.