Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

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

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.