The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.