“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

“Baby," I said, "I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me."

She looked down at me. "Get up off the floor you damn fool and get me a drink.”

“How'd you get in here?"
She raised her eyebrows. “You pick pockets.” Kat watched his hand fly to his back pocket. “I can pick locks. Looking for this?” she asked, holding up his wallet. “Oops. Maybe I can pick pockets too.”

“Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.”

“Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist.”

“So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?”

“Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“Like all of my fictions, Sinner is a mirror. Look into it and you will find yourself. What you do with what you see is your choice.”

“Because we write fiction we mine our souls. Of course you put yourself into your fiction, your fiction is you.”