I was rather a goody-goody as a child... It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.