The world was very feminine when I was young. And now it's very masculine.

I don't believe in convention at all. I do what I have to do to stay alive.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who...have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.