Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?