Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

I have to work in England, but here in America you don't have to work. You can sort of enter the profession of being.

When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice.