With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.