When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

Is there no way out of the mind?

When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.