Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.

The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.