Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I’ll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least...

Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!

The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

What do you see when you see me?’ She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. ‘Do you want the truth?’She nodded.’The firing squad.”That’s not the whole truth. Try again.”Insatiability,’ he said with...

For most of human history, ‘literature,’ both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most...

They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but,...

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time–it is the clue, like...

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where...

Perhaps…I could not be content with mere contentment!

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that...

How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak...

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.This is the moral...

A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny’s house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because...

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw...

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire’s dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted...

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night,...

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and...

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy...

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are...

…as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life...

The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror....

The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim’s ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men;...

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke’s palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money,...

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of...

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

…a great future behind him, already

She stood lost in eternity… watching the immense sky…

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and...

…for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.

She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

It is possible to be a great novelist – that is, to render a veracious account of your times – and a bad writer – that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the...

She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked...

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to...