Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.

Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.

God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.

Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts.

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.