“Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.”

“The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.”

“The Watcher. The Watcher of what? Of teenage girls forced to spend their holiday break filming cable TV specials?”

“...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.”

“The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.”

“Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.”