“The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”

“If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.”

“Only pain makes it grow stronger. One sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and seems to hate me.”

“Substitution . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.”

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

“Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?”