All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.