“But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions...”

“Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke ...”

“In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.”

“I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichs, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in s...”

“I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spoo...”

“I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of s...”

“When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.”

“If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

“sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”

“Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking muck across the floor of fact.”

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”

“The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”