To survive, you must tell stories.

The truth is an anagram of an anagram.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.