I don't think I did anything that my contemporaries didn't; it was just that I was the only one who talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style seemed to be gay. I wanted to indentify with that.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.

And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through.

I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.

I think I quite desperately wanted to have that kind of special companionship [like marriage ] . . . a special relationship, yet I hid from it for many, many years and pretended to be cynical about it.