“They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.”

“I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.”

“There's something aboard that thing, a dark and powerful figure. And it awaits the coming of something--something terrible.”

“One of those largish US women writers on the metaphysics of shagging had declared, as if it were a revelation - and a terrible one - that the sex act inevitably entailed violence on the female. Well, of course it did, you well-meaning, trite, benighted duck.”

“I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.”

“Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.”