“I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.”

“Akri? Can I keep him? See, he good eating. Lots of fat on this one. (Simi)No, Simi. You can’t keep the baby. His mother would miss him. (Acheron)But he want to go home with the Simi. He said so. (Simi)No, Simi. (Acheron)No Simi, no food. Nag, nag, nag. (Simi)”

“She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.”

“I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it.”

“But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”

“He flatters me because he knows I am flattered by him flattering me. And that flatters him. So when he flatters me, he is really flattering himself.”