To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.