Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing 'on the tap roots of the demonic,' but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.

What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever.

The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.

People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subj…

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.

This story is slightly immoral, but so, I guess, are stories based on truth.

I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once th…