I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.