“Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.”

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”

“I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.”

“Yet happiness isn't something you chase, it's something you are. It's something you think, it's something you believe.”

“I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.”

“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”