Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.

If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me.