“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

“He nodded then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policeman like look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.”

“... he lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears.”

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. this is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.”

“Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself. ”

“A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand—”

“When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.”