Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!

I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it's surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.