“The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.”

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.”

“He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.”

“That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.”

“What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.”

“Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall.”

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this.”