We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.