We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action....

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers’ wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip...

Sometimes out of sheer perversity reality conforms to my wishes.

Why do people value most the things they haven’t got?

An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other...

It didn’t take a genius to figure out I’d come to Perver City. Technically a suburb of New Age City, Perver City is where all the people who can’t make it in New Age City...

All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause....

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and ‘correspondences’, rather than to realistically depict the world. … the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity....

Perversion is just another form of art. It’s like painting or drawing or sculpting. Except instead of paint, us perverts use sex as our medium. 

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity’s sake, and all the better for that; the image created...