I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

If there were a God he would want us to be better spirited than to take his word for everything.

As I say I don't want to kill myself, I just wouldn't mind dying.

It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they're truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they're greatness as it were improves you.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.