“Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.”

“She was the only one left, and she was real.To be the only one, and to know that you are real - that's sanity, isn't it?But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending that one was a stuffed figure. Not to move. Never to move. Just to sit here in the tiny room, forever and ever.If she sat there without moving, they wouldn't punish her.If she sat there without moving, they'd know that she was sane, sane, sane.She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars.It lighted on her hand.If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly.But she didn't swat it.She didn't swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that proved what sort of a person she really was.Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...”

“That's the way girls were--they always laughed. Because they were bitches.”

“Everything in this business makes sense, because it serves a real purpose, fills a need that's a part of living. Even a single nail, like this one, fulfills a function. Drive it into a crucial place and you can depend on it to do a job, keep on doing it for a hundred years to come. Long after we're dead and gone, both of us.”

“Funny how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.”

“So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.”

“Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember.”