i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person.

we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.