When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.