In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.