Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Imagination is a killer.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.