“I liked the place I came from.But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.”

“I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?”

“Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.”

“What was the worst thing you've ever done?I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...”

“What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.”

“... He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.”

“Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.”