Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.