[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city’s skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.

I am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

I had reached the conclusion myself that sex was not a division but a continuum, that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature's phenomena.