Yes, well.” The Devil says, “Things just get better and better nowadays.

Babies weren’t babies – they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep.

It’s easy not to find out things, if you try hard enough.

How could I love you? How could I love a ghost? How could I love something that I have to keep hidden in my pocket?

She shone like a bright strange star shining in those empty lifeless halls, I write.

It’s very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.

So what do you think? Should the toothpaste and the condiments go next to the Elmer’s glue and the hair gel and lubricants? Make a shelf of sticky things? Or should I put it with the chewing tobacco and the mouth-wash, and make a little display of things that you spit?

What happens when you get to the end of the world? Sometimes you find a party. This party has been going on for a long time. There is music, lights, people drinking and dancing. Strange things happen at these parties. It is the end of the world, after all.

I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers. “There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you’ve changed the mechanism.

I’m not good at the friends thing. I’m the human equivalent of one of those baby birds that fall out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back. Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong. I think I smell wrong.