“I felt as though thepast and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going.If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we needthose stories. I guess I do.”

“If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.”

“What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.”

“We all have our own patterns, I guess ... And whether we like it or not, they persist.”

“My day starts like a regular guy’s. I wake up, drink raw eggs, run around Philadelphia, and punch raw slabs of meat. Wait, that’s not my story—that’s Rocky’s. I get us confused all the time.”

“I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.”