…the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they’re fighting for the sake of an idea....

Don’t you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?” he said.

He didn’t seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn’t appear to belong to our world. But...

The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they’re fighting for the sake of an idea. We’ve been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that...

I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind – perhaps all at once. But to...

Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a...

It’s a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god’s handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing...

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

There is something talismanic about familiar words.