Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled--or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.