...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

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

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

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.

Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.