The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.