I don't think you can really be proud of being gay because it isn't something you've done. You can only be proud of not being ashamed.

In Manhattan, when you're out of the front door, you're on, and you have to be ready to smile and speak to people.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.

Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

What I wanted most of all was to use sex as a weapon to allure, subjugate, and, if possible, destroy the personality of others.

America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.