I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.