To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.